Shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Awards 2022 (Best First Novel).
Lestari Aris is a woman on the edge. Her tattoo studio on Karangahape Road is hammered by burglaries; the hangers-on in her life, from a teenage runaway to a married cop, are bonded to her for reasons she can’t fathom. And years after Lestari’s father disappeared, her Indonesian mother is still lost in a self-medicated blur.
When a murder in Symonds Street Cemetery whirls Lestari into the orbit of an unpredictable drug, she uncovers a decades-long covert clinical study targeting rough sleepers and others on the fringes – and its dark connections with her own life and history. Everything is connected: the past is circling. How far will Lestari go to save someone she loves?
Set in a vivid, grimy inner-city Auckland, Isobar Precinct explores perceptions of time and progress, and asks whether the past ever disappears.
‘An offhand, easily missed mention of MKUltra — a covert CIA project that ran from 1954 to 1975, in which unwitting subjects were given experimental drugs to alter their behaviour — is a clue to a part of the background of the story, but it gives no hint of the subtle and surprising way that story line unfolds. To borrow a term once used to describe Beethoven’s quartets, there’s a controlled unpredictability to it all that makes Isobar Precinct a compelling joy to read.
Summarising the plot gives no sense of the novel’s many pleasures: the turns of phrase, the sharp characterisations and the uncanny way Kasmara renders some of the more magical moments — including time travel — in a way that renders it plausible and clear’, Tom Moody writes in Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books.
Read more reviews of Isobar Precinct in The Pantograph Punch, Kete, and Landfall.
