Lost Paradise - Tapa blanda

"Beautiful, dreamlike and oddly beguiling" (The Times)

"A charming, sinuous, playful novel...global, universal, in its scope and feeling" (David Robson Sunday Telegraph)

"Nooteboom writes beautifully. His prose is clean and precise without feeling sparse, and he manages to combine clarity with intense lyricism" (Rebecca Abrahams Guardian)

"A plot as finely tuned as a concert piano...this is a novel which finally soars" (Glasgow Herald)

"Nooteboom has shown himself a master of ironic wisdom, but also of elated, elegiac feeling" (Ben Rogers Independent on Sunday)

Alma and Almut share a fascination for Australia and its ancient peoples; their ceremonies, sand drawings and body paintings. After Alma suffers a traumatic attack, they board a cheap flight from São Paulo to Sydney, and together begin their journey across their secret continent. Alma slowly recovers through a brief love affair with an Aboriginal artist, and both women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to discover.

In a seemingly unconnected story, a man staying at a remote Alpine spa unexpectedly meets a woman he encountered years before and with whom he shared a single night. It was in a faraway city and she was dressed as an angel...