I wrote the very first sketch of this novel six years ago, as a response to reading The Flight, by Horacio Verbitsky, which chronicles the confession of Adolfo Scilingo, a Navy officer haunted by his role in disappearances in Argentina. Scilingo’s story was the first to reveal that some of the disappeared were “disposed of” by being thrown, naked and alive, from airplanes into the sea. The image of these bodies, lost in the water between Argentina and Uruguay, stirred in me. I wrote a two-page story in which the spirits of the disappeared rose out of the water, years after their deaths, to visit their torturers and their loved ones. This tiny story was never published, though it did win an honorable mention in a contest judged by Margaret Atwood. It became the seed of Perla.

In April, I’ll be reading from Perla in ten U.S. cities – click here for details on events.

A title from Haus Publishing's imprint specializing in Arabic literature, Arabia books.

I’ve just learned that Perla has found its way to a British publisher. HAUS Publishing of London has bought the rights to the novel, and anticipates releasing it as early as this July.

HAUS was founded in 2002 by Barbara Haus Schwepke, inspired by the suggestion of W.G. Sebald, who urged more space for translations of world literature into English. (As a translator myself, that’s enough to make my heart sing.)

HAUS has published in-depth bigraphies and histories, and in 2008 launched Arabia Books, which includes some of the biggest names in Arabic fiction, many translated into English for the first time.

At the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair, HAUS announced Swallow Editions, an initiative to support emerging writers from the Middle East, the voices of the Arab Spring.

I’m incredibly honored to join a press with such an inspiring commitment to globally significant literature.

The April issue of O, the Oprah Magazine, now on newsstands, features an eloquent and generous review of Perla, calling it “mesmerizing…a moving, poetic novel about the costs of revolution and the evolutionary process that is identity.” This is the first official non-advance review for Perla, which launches here in the U.S. on March 27. (Read the full review here.)

Meanwhile, during my beautiful trip to Norway this month for the world premiere of Perla, the Norwegian Foreign Ministry created a video interview with me (with the talented journalist  journalist Carina Wint), a sensitive exploration of the disappearances of Argentina and their aftermath, and an effective primer for anyone seeking an introduction to the issue:

Meanwhile, my April book tour is just inches away from being fully set and confirmed. I’ll continue to put up details as they become solid (see here for what I have so far). I’ll be in San Diego, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, New York, Corte Madera, Oakland, and Berkeley, reading from and talking about Perla. And six months pregnant by then. Have baby belly, will travel.

The Norwegian cover of PERLA

Norway, of course, has made incredible contributions to global literature: Sigrid Undset, Knut Hamsun, Henrik Ibsen, to name a few. And the Norwegians I’ve had the chance to meet so far have given me glimpses of a culture of kindness and gentle strength.

I’ll never forget what my Norwegian editor wrote to me after the tragic 2011 Norway attacks: “There are flowers and silence all over Oslo.” If more cultures responded this way to mass violence, surely our world would be very different.

Perla is a book about, among other things, how to live in the wake of tragic violence, and the possibilities for resilience, rebirth, and even love in such circumstances. What a humbling opportunity it is to share this book in Norway, and to not only present Perla, but to listen and learn as well.

Novels are a long, slow affair. The idea for this book cooked for a year before I started writing it in earnest, in January of 2007. Since then, it has accompanied me through all the other changes in my life – including launching my first novel and becoming a mother. A novel demands that you work on it, and with it, over the years, growing alongside it, stretching your own limits to meet its evolving demands. You devote yourself to its invisible world, day after day, season after season. Few people, if any, see the fruits of your labors along the way. It’s like painting a secret mural on the back of an enormous building, where only you have access. Every day you get up and add paint to that gargantuan surface, brushstroke after brushstroke, for what seems like forever. Then somehow, at some time, you are finished, you submit the work into another’s care, and before you know it the building turns 180 degrees and your work is exposed to the street.

The exposure is both exciting and startling.

With Perla, I’ve been deeply moved to hear early readers talk about the way the book opens gates for them to discover recent Argentinean history, specifically the aftermath of disappearances and their intimate effects on families and the nation as a whole. These are stories, not only of pain, but of immense human courage, and of love’s survival against the odds – stories as universally resonant as they are particular. I have been honored to swim through these stories to write Perla.

Here are two recent starred reviews of Perla, both very kind, in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

Read the full review here.