'Once inside this decaying mansion, [Anaïs] and we are transfixed by a series of spectres from the Echeverrías' history. Lickorish Quinn's best sentences… flow through present participles that conjure sights and sounds… strange, and spectacular.'
The Dust Never Settles
Karina Lickorish Quinn
‘A breath-taking writer of singular voice’ Patrick Flanery, author of Absolution
‘I have seen ghosts. They will not rest. The whispers of the past are all around…’
Sweeping from the bustling beaches of contemporary Lima to local ceviche bars crammed with fishermen, music and folklore; from the rise and fall of the Inca Empire to a civil war that will devastate a nation, The Dust Never Settles is a love letter to Peru.
And running through it all, like the warm smell of orange blossom she remembers from her childhood, is Anaïs, who has returned to the country she loves after seven years abroad. Her beloved grandparents have passed away, and the time has come for her to sell the ‘yellow house on the hill’.
As Anaïs prepares to say a final goodbye, she is haunted by memories. Dark truths of previous generations are hidden behind these crumbling walls – secrets that threaten to overwhelm her…
Reviews
Sunday Telegraph
'A heady blend of Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in which stories and visions proliferate dizzyingly in all directions, this is an impressive first outing.'
Daily Mail
'An absolute must-read. I was glued to its pages from the first to the last and am still struggling to believe that such an accomplished creation is Quinn's debut… A wonderfully immersive experience.'
Literary Flits
'The writing is brilliant, the scope of the novel is quite astounding especially given it is a debut… Did it make my head spin – yes it did. Would I recommend it on to others – yes I would. Would I read her next novel – yes I would.'
Independent Book Reviews
'Lickorish Quinn's magnificent debut enchants from first page to last... A breath-taking writer of singular voice.'
Patrick Flanery, author of Absolution
'A mesmerising feat of imagination and a masterful debut.'
Paul Lynch, author of Irish Novel of the Year winner, Grace
'Karina Lickorish Quinn is the new face of magic realism. She has given it, through Anaïs, a female body and soul… She makes it sing, she makes it work and she has built a world that stands on its own three feet. Like its title, The Dust Never Settles will stay floating inside the reader, impossible to forget or unsee.'
Laia Jufresa, author of Umami
'An innovative and precisely imagined exploration of identity, family, ghosts, and the intersection between personal and national history. It swept me away.'
Clare Fisher, author of All the Good Things
'The Dust Never Settles is ambitious, fascinating and endlessly inventive – a time-bending, kaleidoscopic fever dream in which the living coexist with the dead, and the past with present.'
Luiza Sauma, author of Everything You Ever Wanted
'Karina Lickorish Quinn has rendered on the page a person and a place in all their conflicted histories so convincingly and dizzyingly and singularly that the very ink haunts. It leaves a shadow text on the reader’s psyche. The Dust Never Settles is a marvelous, vertiginous work that mercilessly conveys the post-colonial state.'
Caoilinn Hughes, author of The Wild Laughter
'The sheer scope and ambition of this extraordinary novel mesmerises with its lucidity and force of imagination… A superb debut novel by one of the most exciting British Latinx voices of a generation.'
Morning Star
'Always colourful, its magical realism beautifully realised, this novel brims with Peruvian folklore and history as Anaïs negotiates ghosts from the past and comes to terms with long-buried secrets.'
Daily Mail
Karina Lickorish Quinn
Karina Lickorish Quinn is a bilingual, Peruvian-British writer raised in Lima, the English Midlands and New York. Karina has a BA from Oxford University, an MA from UCL, and a PhD from Queen Mary University of London. She is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Her work has appeared in The Offing, Asymptote and elsewhere, and her short fiction features in Un Nuevo Sol, the first major anthology of British-Latinx writers. In 2016, she was shortlisted for The White Review’s short story prize. The Dust Never Settles is her first novel.
Author page
