Beauty Is a Wound

A colour-drenched, fantasy-tinged epic tale.

One stormswept afternoon, after twenty-one years of being dead, Dewi Ayu rises from her grave to avenge a curse placed on her family. Amidst the orange groves and starfruit trees, her children and grandchildren have been living out lives of madness, incest, murder and heartbreak. They are creatures of breathtaking beauty - all but one of them, whose ugliness is unparalleled.

And Beauty is her name.

Beauty Is a Wound is a bawdy, epic tale of fearsome women and weak-willed men, communist ghosts and chaste princesses. In this satirical portrait of Indonesia's painful past, Kurniawan weaves together history with local legend to spin a fantastical masterpiece in which darkness and light dance hand in hand.

Translated by Annie Tucker