Erick Setiawan ist ein Erzähler, dessen Werke sich mit der Komplexität der menschlichen Psyche und gesellschaftlichen Spannungen auseinandersetzen. Aufgewachsen in Indonesien in einer von Spannungen geprägten Zeit, fand er Trost in der Literatur und der Welt der Fantasie. Seine frühen Erfahrungen in katholischen Schulen und sein anschließender Umzug in die Vereinigten Staaten prägten seine Weltsicht und durchdrangen seine Prosa mit tiefem Verständnis. Obwohl er ursprünglich Psychologie und Informatik studierte, setzte sich seine Leidenschaft für das Schreiben schließlich durch und führte zu Erzählungen, die Themen wie Entwurzelung, die Suche nach Identität und die Widerstandsfähigkeit des menschlichen Geistes erforschen.
From high in the house that stands on the hill, young Meridia watches her stern father Gabriel, disappear off into a mist each night and her proud mother speaking to her pots and pans in strange language ... A haunting and mythical debut from a major new literary talent.
Erick Setiawan's richly atmospheric debut is a beautiful, engrossing fable of three generations of women in two families; their destructive jealousies, their loves and losses, their sacrifices and deeply rooted deceptions, and their triumphs. Of Bees and Mist is a fable of one woman's determination to overcome the haunting magic that is created by the people she loves and the oppressive secrets behind their broken lives. Raised in a sepulchral house where ghosts dwell in mirrors, Meridia spends her childhood feeling neglected and invisible. Every evening her father vanishes inside a blue mist without so much as an explanation, and her mother spends her days beheading cauliflowers in the kitchen. At sixteen, desperate to escape, Meridia marries a tenderhearted young man. Little does she suspect that his family is harboring secrets of their own. There is a grave hidden in the garden. There are two sisters groomed from birth to despise each other. And there is Eva, the formidable matriarch whose grievances swarm the air like an army of bees—the wickedest mother-in-law imaginable. Erick Setiawan takes Meridia on a tumultuous ride of hope and heartbreak as she struggles to keep her young family together and discovers long-kept secrets about her own past as well as the shocking truths about her husband's family.