An unnamed narrator returns to her ancestral home in an environmentally depleted harbor city with a baby in her care. She has escaped from what she calls "the breach"--the collapse of the climate-controlled domed city where she grew up. From a thread about the narrator's childhood, we learn that the breach was caused by the hysterical growth of the genetically-modified trees in the domed city, a growth which is spreading over the earth. From a thread about the history of the harbor city, we learn of an ancient war that was fought there. In the thread which follows the narrative present, there is a storm which floods the harbor city. The narrator's mother disappears and the baby falls ill. The narrator then journeys to city's river to preform the funeral rites for her mother and cure the baby. At the river, the three narrative threads come together.
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint was born in Yangon, Myanmar and grew up in Bangkok, Thailand and San José, California. She is the author of the lyric novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven (Noemi Press, 2018), which won an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the category of Adult Fiction, was named one of Entropy Magazine's Best Books of 2018, and was a Small Press Distribution bestseller. Her second book, Names for Light: A Family History was the winner of the 2018 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in August 2021.
She is the recipient of a Fulbright grant to Spain, residencies at Hedgebrook and Millay Colony, and fellowships from Tin House and Summer Literary Seminars. She holds a B.A. in literary arts from Brown University and an M.F.A. in prose from the University of Notre Dame and a Ph.D. in english-creative writing from the University of Denver, where she served as the associate editor of the Denver Quarterly. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College, where she teaches creative writing and literature.
"Hypnotic, surreal, heartbreakingly brutal and unfathomably beautiful, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint's The End of Peril is a tale that unfolds with a resonant, graceful urgency—one that left me spellbound, devastated, and renewed. I savored every sentence—every brutally gorgeous line." - Matthew Vollmer
"The animals have gone wild and the walls of the house tremble in the face of the fierce, loud hush that haunts Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint's marvelous debut. I was taken from the first page to the last by Myint's extraordinary sentences, which put me happily in mind of Marie Redonnet or Renee Gladman, and by the powerfully strange world of cities and families and searching they build. There is so much to admire here, not least one of my favorite moments in recent contemporary writing: a young women who uses the blade of her hair to cut off chunks of the moon. I can't recommend The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, a Haven strongly enough." - Laird Hunt
"What an amazingly beautiful changeling of a book. Whenever I was sure I had a pulse on it, it would bloom into something else entirely. Within what seems to be such spareness of words, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint invokes a whole universe that clutches close the realms of memory, dream, and imagination, erasing the boundaries between the living and the dead, the sky and the earth, reality and myth. Myint interrogates the mother/daughter relationship as well as the beginnings and endings of love and life, reminiscent of the myth-making poetic prose in Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River. In the subtle guise of Italo Calivno's Invisible Cities, she philosophizes on spaces and habitude and internal strife. You will fall deep into the deepest darkness and fear and hope and desire and love and longing in these pages. It's a lovely journey there and out." - Jenny Boully
