Strangers at the Port

Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left.

Her best friend, beside her older sister, Giovanna, is a donkey. She ties ribbons around his head and thinks she will marry him when the time comes.

The sisters' days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation.

It is a place that feels stuck in time: verdant, plentiful, peaceful.

Until the men arrive.

And a foreign yacht anchors at the port.

And the vines begin to fail.

And everything changes.

From the author of Dolores, Strangers at the Port is an exquisite, enchanted, atmospheric novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.

About the Author

Lauren Aimee Curtis was born in Sydney. Her first book, Dolores , was shortlisted for the Readings Prize, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, and was selected as a New Statesman Book of the Year. She has written for Granta, The White Review and Sydney Review of Books, among other publications. In 2023, she was named one of Granta's Best Young British Novelists.