Laksmi Pamuntjak

Praise for "AMBA: The Question of Red":

• One of Asia's greatest modern love stories! It is never easy to combine personal tragedy and love with a political holocaust, but Pamuntjak writes with such enormous confidence, emotional maturity and beauty that she has no problem merging the two. This novel, translated by herself into English, unquestionably places Indonesian fiction on the map of the 21st century and Pamuntjak as one of its principle writers.

  - Ahmed Rashid, contributor for The New York Times

• A huge bestseller on its publication in Indonesia, The Question of Red signalled Laksmi Pamuntjak's bravery and scope as a writer, and may yet prove to be a landmark work of South East Asian writing.

  - Tash Aw, author of Harmony Silk Factory, Map of the Invisible World, and Five Star Billionaire

• This heart wrenching novel is much more than a long overdue look at Indonesia’s genocidal past. It is a poetic reflection on the traumas that divide a society and the emotional as well as political complexities in addressing and thus healing them.

  - Ilija Trojanow

• … perfectly captures the dizzying unsteadiness of a traumatized world poised between normalcy and catastrophe.

  - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, in its Top 8 Books of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2015 section

• The novel combines poetic language and the conviction of literature as an instrument of enlightenment without once sacrificing its aesthetics.

  - Neue Zuercher Zeitung