"Few books deserve the appellation 'Proustian'; Issa Quincy's Absence, with its circling, wondrous, erudite prose, is one of them. An auspicious debut."
--Karan Mahajan, author of The Association of Small Bombs

"Through its archive of narratives nestled within narratives, this exquisite novel creates a beguiling soundscape of echoes and murmurs that reverberates in the mind long after the reading. In lucid, captivating prose, Issa Quincy constructs a palimpsest composed of the fractals and losses that define the numberless strata of the past. Recalling the novels of W. G. Sebald and the films of Chris Marker, Absence is a mournful and luminous meditation on the work of remembering."
--Christine Lai, author of Landscapes

"A shimmering mirror of a novel, elegiac, Proustian, kaleidoscopic, where absence becomes the gravitational force of creation."

--Lila Azam Zanganeh, author of The Enchanter

"Like a magic trick in which centuries emerge from a thimble, this brief and deeply satisfying novel reveals the ongoing miracle of survival--cloaked in the everyday."
--Lucy Ives, author of Life is Everywhere