Absence author Issa Quincy wept finishing Journey to the End of the Night – debutiful

Issa Quincy’s debut novel, Absence, is a haunting and atmospheric exploration of memory, connection, and the lingering traces of the past. Told through the lives of seemingly unconnected characters, including an aging doctor in Cyprus, a child in the English countryside, and a hotel guest returning each year in grief, this lyrical novel gradually reveals the mysterious thread binding them all: a recurring poem that passes from person to person like a ghost.

We asked the writer to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know him and the books that shaped his life.

What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?

I loved to draw as a child and often spent my free time with two friends filling pink notebooks we called ‘rough books’ with cartoon drawings, and comics. I was very influenced by the illustrations in The Invention of Hugo Cabaret for a long time and took a copy everywhere with me. And, by my sister’s copy of Maus, which much to her annoyance I took to boarding school with me.

What book helped you through puberty?

Nothing helped me through puberty more than playing football and playfighting with my friends. But the author that came to me in the midst of all that hot-headed mistiness was Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Something in his full-throated misanthropy, his venomous and shifty pathos called out to me in that time. When I reached the end of Journey to the End of the Night, I wept. 

What book do you think all teenagers should be assigned in school?

The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea by Yukio Mishima for its bone-clean, beautiful prose. And it’s moral world–as muddy and strange as our own. If not this, then 

If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the syllabus?

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder. So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ. How It Is by Samuel Beckett. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Passages by Ann Quin. 

What books helped guide you while writing your book?

Antwerp by Roberto Bolano. Marcovaldo by Italo Calvino. The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald. 

What books are on your nightstand now?

Loving by Henry Green and a book of Wallace Stevens poems.