Han Smith, author of the “extraordinary” (Adam Zmith) Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, has been featured in The Guardian. You can read the full article, in which Han talks about the books she has been reading this June, here.

Han’s debut novel, Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking, was published by John Murray Press last month.

The almost daughter is almost normal, because she knows how to know and also not know.

She knows and does not know, for instance, about the barracks by the athletics field, and about the lonely woman she visits each week. She knows—almost—about ghosts, and their ghosts, and she knows not to have questions about them. She knows to focus on being a woman: on training her body and dreaming only of escape.

Then, the almost daughter meets Oksana. Oksana is not even almost normal, and the questions she has are not normal at all.

Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking is a story of seeing and part-seeing, of silence and speaking out, of conformation and confrontation, by an exhilarating new voice in fiction.

Get your copy of this “intimate, intricate, and ultimately irresistible” (Ruby Cowling) debut from Amazon, or, better, via your local bookshop or Bookshop.org.

Follow Han on Twitter @Han_Smiff.