The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is exactly what the title of the novel suggests: strange, sorrowful, and, above all, very beautiful. It tells the story of the Roux family, a family with a history of tragic love stories. Ava Lavender, the story’s protagonist, is born with wings, which leads to two questions that haunt her every winged step: Where did she come from, and what does the world do with a girl like her? To answer these questions, Ava delves into her family’s history and her own, resulting in a stunning, surreal and lyrical story that feels like a fairy tale, despite the sorrowful themes.

Leslye Walton’s debut was acclaimed as one of the best novels published in 2014 by several websites and magazines, including Amazon, Publishers Weekly and the American Booksellers for Children, and won the Pacific Northwest Book Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award in 2015. It is a coming-of-age story laced with magic realism, which is, thanks to its intriguing characters and beautiful, whimsical style of writing, rightfully called a ‘must-read’ by British newspaper The Guardian. With this impressive and enchanting debut, Walton certainly proves that she is an excellent writer of whom we can expect very much in the future.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender was published in several languages, including Italian, Czech, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish and Catalan. Leslye Walton is represented by Victoria Sanders & Associates in New York. This translation was published with their kind consent and cooperation.