The Story of H

From an audacious new talent, The Story of H follows a Japanese woman and an American soldier as they search for a young girl who goes missing in the aftermath of Hiroshima, an extraordinary journey that spans the globe and travels to the darkest corners of the human mind and memory
August 6, 1945: the day the Enola Gay unleashed an atomic inferno over Hiroshima. In the wake of its devastation, two stories unfold. There's Jim, an American soldier who goes in search of Yoro, a child entrusted to his care who disappears after the atomic bomb falls. And there's H, a Japanese girl who is at school nearby when the bomb drops and is indel-ibly marked by its destruction. Both victims of the bomb, H and Jim meet for the first time in New York years later—their paths cross by chance, they fall in love, and together they continue Jim's search for Yoro. A quixotic twenty-first-century quest to discover what makes us human—from refugee camps to the slave mines of Africa, from Brazil to Borneo, Japan to Mexico—it's also a journey that plumbs the depths and heights of cruelty and compassion, vulnerability and violence.
Marina Perezagua's urgent, incantatory, and highly original novel, rendered in a vibrant translation by Valerie Miles, moves us beyond our understanding of history as broad and sweeping to the individual stories of those who feel joy and pain, who suffer and transcend. Both dazzling and dark, The Story of H pulsates with a terrible beauty and power that linger with the reader long after the last page.

Marina Perezagua is a Spanish novelist and short story writer known for her powerfully visual and mind-bending narratives. She has published two short story collections and a novel in Spain and her stories have been published in outlets including Electric Literature and Granta UK. She has a degree in art history and is currently completing her PhD at New York University, where she also teaches at the NYU Master's Program in Creative Writing in Spanish. She practices freediving and has swum across the Gibraltar Strait in less than four hours.