Karina Lickorish Quinn is a Peruvian-British writer. She is the author of The Dust Never Settles (Oneworld, 2021), The House of Skin (Stanchion, 2023) and The River Dies Quietly (Oneworld, 2027). She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway University of London where she also leads the Creative Writing programmes. She is represented by Seren Adams at Lexington Literary.
To resist is dangerous.
Jessica Flores, matriarch, internationally recognised model and fierce environmental activist, dies suddenly.
Ten years on, her daughters Claudia and Ariana are living on different continents, struggling to live up to her legacy. But when plans to dam the Yuraqyaku River threaten the Andean valley where their mother was born, they are drawn into a battle to save it and the river at its heart.But behind the project lies a web of corruption stretching far beyond Peru. And in its wake, a trail of activists who have lost their lives. As Claudia and Ariana are pulled deeper into the fight, they uncover secrets they are unprepared to face, forcing them to question everything they thought they knew about their family and their past.
The River Dies Quietly is a powerful story about corporate greed, the decimation of the natural world, and a family risking it all to save their way of life.
'I have seen ghosts. They will not rest. The whispers of the past are all around...'
Anaïs Echevarría is returning to Lima to sell her ancestral home, the notorious 'yellow house' that looms over the sprawling capital below, its history woven into the fabric of the city. But concealed within its walls are spectres from the past that demand her attention, the echoing voices of the family who lived in this grand home, and the injustices on which both the country and the house were built.
In Lima, where elapsed time coats every surface like a layer of fine dust, these ghosts will not rest until the sins of the past are atoned for. And, while Anaïs comes to terms with her history, the present threatens to overwhelm her. Pregnant, nervous and alone, what begins as an uneasy homecoming soon becomes a reckoning with secrets that refuse to stay buried.
Perfect for fans of Isabel Allende and Kazuo Ishiguro, this hauntingly beautiful debut will seduce, entice and mesmerise.
Praise for The Dust Never Settles
‘A sorcerer walks through these pages weaving time past and time present into a Scheherazadean swirl. This is a mesmerising feat of imagination and a masterful debut.’
- Paul Lynch, author of Irish Novel of the Year winner, Grace
'Captivating and epic in scale, sumptuously imagined, with a wry and generous vision of human frailty, Lickorish Quinn’s magnificent debut enchants from first page to last. This is a novel that takes seriously the claims of history—of colonialism and slavery in particular—tracing their reverberations across the centuries and into the present. It is a work of astonishing empathy and expansiveness, a story that bends spacetime to take us on a journey towards a place and an hour where redemption might prove possible. Working at the intersection of languages and cultures, the global north and the global south, Lickorish Quinn is a breath-taking writer of singular voice.'
- Patrick Flanery, author of Absolution
'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
'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 Everthing You Ever Wanted
Where does a woman's life end and her art begin?
At a gallery one night, a young sculptor meets Cyan, an art collector with a turquoise beard, a detached charm, and a wife recently dead. Bewitched by him and his posse of elegant friends, the sculptor agrees to accompany them to a party and finds herself plunged into their world of eccentric decadence. Cyan and his clique are worshipped by flocks of struggling artists, all desperate to be discovered. When Cyan invites her to complete a residency at his mansion home, the sculptor believes her big break has finally come.
But what is it about the house that so unnerves her? And how much will she sacrifice for success?
Breakfast at the Windsor Miramar in Wasafiri / Of Magpies and Mockingwords in Longitudines / OLAMs in Palabritas / The Walls of Gringo Buckman in Un Nuevo Sol / Autoptes or An Eye Witness in Roehampton Roundtable / The Grief of Lupita Ramírez Ospina in Journal of Latina Critical Feminism / Spanglish in Asymptote / Oögenesis in The White Review.
CONTACT
I am represented by Seren Adams at Lexington Literary.
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