Angelique Kasmara

Angelique Kasmara’s debut novel Isobar Precinct (2021, The Cuba Press) won the Wallace Foundation Prize, was shortlisted for the Ngaio Marsh and NZ Booklovers Awards, and has recently been published as an audiobook by Bolinda. She is editor for The Three Lamps, reviews co-editor for takahē, and she also reviews books for the Aotearoa Review of Books, NZ Listener, and Kete. She is a features writer for Family Care magazine, and her fiction and creative non-fiction has appeared in the NZ Listener, Newsroom, Ko Aotearoa Tātou | We Are New Zealand, A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices, and Planeta Distante Aotearoa: ecos y voces de la larga nube blanca. She completed her Master of Creative Writing at the University of Auckland.

 

Genre:

  • Adult Fiction
  • Crime
  • Feature Articles
  • Fiction
  • Freelance Writer
  • Review Writing
  • Short Stories
  • Science Fiction
  • Web Writing

Skills:

  • Editing
  • Freelance Writing
  • Novelist
  • Print Media Writing (magazines/newspapers)
  • Proofreading
  • Reviews
  • Website Content

Branch:

Auckland

Location:

Publications:

Isobar Precinct

‘The first half of the novel is carefully constructed, putting in place the world the second half will demolish. Kasmara uses a beautiful feature of doubling, where from a central point in the novel repetition begins to occur. This symmetry allows for some wonderful play with the characters, and there’s an action scene straight out of the Christopher Nolan film Tenet in both halves of the novel that toys with the tropes of time travel.’

—Josie Shapiro

‘Kasmara has created an original and striking first novel. It’s epic, bold and cinematic. In Isobar Precinct, time is a slippery snake that gets under your skin; it shifts and moves, it comes full circle. It is alive.’

—Colleen Maria Lenihan

‘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

Winner of the 2016 Wallace Foundation Prize. Finalist for the 2022 Ngaio Marsh Awards (Best First Book) and the 2022 NZ Booklovers Awards.

Print and ebook: The Cuba Press, 2021

https://thecubapress.nz/shop/isobar-precinct/ 

https://bookhub.co.nz/p/isobar-precinct?barcode=9781988595436&search_key=isobar

Audiobook: Bolinda, 2024

https://shop.bolinda.com/aus/search/results.aspx?/1/-/10/0/1/1/1/1/1/3/isobar%20precinct