Nowhere to Land

She had been Heloísa once.Then she moved to Sydney, where the cafés started calling her Lisa, and slowly, over nine years, Heloísa became smaller and smaller until she was barely a sound at the bottom of a stranger's voicemail.Now she has a husband who does not speak Portuguese. A son who has stopped speaking it. A job at a logistics company that uses none of her senior finance training. And one Saturday morning, walking into her own kitchen, she forgets what she came in for.She is convinced something is wrong with her brain.She is right, and she is wrong.What follows is not a medical mystery. It is the slow, luminous unwinding of nine years of self-erasure, told in the spare, observational prose of contemporary literary fiction. From the western suburbs of Sydney to a hospital bedside in São Paulo, from a stranger's kitchen at six in the evening to a Saturday ferry crossing the harbour, Heloísa Rocha finally confronts the question no one has asked her in nine years.When an old boss in Brazil offers her a way back to the woman she used to be, she has to decide whether returning is the answer, or whether it was never a place she needed to go.Who is she when she stops pretending to be someone else?Nowhere to Land is a luminous debut about immigration, memory, cross-cultural marriage, and the small daily work of becoming visible to yourself. For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, and Susannah Cahalan's Brain on Fire.