Dimensions
135 x 202 x 20mm
With the infectious narration of Nick Hornby and the vibrant lyricism of Junot Díaz, this breathtaking debut brimming with youthful brio chronicles a young man's friendship with a most peculiar artist.On a rooftop in Brooklyn one spring night, a young intern and would-be writer, newly arrived from Copenhagen, meets the intriguing artist and mathematician Ana Ivan. Clever and funny, with an air of mystery and melancholia, Ana is living like a prime number: fierce and unbroken and divisible only by herself. She is also bad luck, she confesses; she is from a cursed Romanian lineage.Before long, the intern finds himself seduced by Ana's enthralling stories-of her unlucky countrymen, of her parents' romance during the worst years of Nicolae Ceausescu's dictatorship, of a daylight savings transition gone horribly wrong. Ana also introduces him to her latest artistic endeavor: following the astronomical rather than the Gregorian calendar, she is trying to alter her sense of time-an experiment that will lead her to live in complete darkness for one month.Descending into the blackness with Ana, the intern slowly loses touch with his own existence, entangling himself in the lives of Ana; her starry-eyed mother, Maria; and her obsessive math-prodigy father, Ciprian. Peeling back the layers of Ana's past, he eventually discovers the perverse tragedy that has haunted her family for decades and has shaped her journey from the streets of Bucharest to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and finally to New York City.The Invention of Ana blurs the lines between narrative and memory, perception and reality, identity and authenticity. In his stunning debut novel, Mikkel Rosengaard illuminates the profound power of stories to alter the world around us-and the lives of the ones we love.