Cupido Cupido
a novel
PEN/Bellwether Finalist (2023) for socially engaged fiction
NOT YET AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE
Henry Zarlis has lived on a remote hilltop in Hale Creek, Kentucky longer than he ever lived in Indonesia. After he breaks his arm in an untimely woodworking accident, his children decide he can no longer manage the work of running a homestead on his own, and that his grandson, nicknamed Egg, will spend his summer vacation working to get the property ready to sell.
What Egg didn’t expect was to find the house already empty of memorabilia, of anything that predates the birth of his mother, except for a single stack of letters written in a language he cannot read. Nor did he expect to make the bewildering discovery of a bird thought to have gone extinct in the 1930’s living at the base of the hill. This startling encounter draws a biologist and her team to the property just as Henry’s family is planning to remove him from his homeplace of more than fifty years.
Not only does the discovery of the avian species urge those closest to the event to consider the lives of the non-human beings living in their own backyards, it also provokes fervent discussion in Hale Creek, especially among those viewing the event as not worthy of all the hubbub.
Meanwhile, the letters Egg discovers begin to illuminate Opa’s enigmatic past. Written over a period of nearly twenty years, from 1952 to 1968, they describe the struggle for economic and political stability that followed Indonesia’s tumultuous fight for independence, slowly interweaving these events with Opa’s transition into manhood, from a woodworking apprentice in a Djakarta kampung to an American immigrant adopting the identity of another man.
★★★★★ Cupido Cupido tackles two of the more contentious subjects of our time—species extinction and immigration—and confronts them with compassion and curiosity.
For representation inquiries, please contact the author directly.
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