Beauty is a Wound Paperback – 12 Feb 2016 by Eka Kurniawan (Author)

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour and romance in a sweeping saga. The novel begins with the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, at the time of World War II. The beautiful half-Dutch, half-Indonesian prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million 'Communists', followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule.