RGB_FRONT COVER_Tetra Nova.jpg
RGB_FRONT COVER_Tetra Nova.jpg

Tetra Nova

£12.74 £16.99

by Sophia Terazawa

Tetra Nova is an operatic, polyphonic novel. At its heart lies the question of postcolonial burdens of identity, exile, narration, and history.

In late-twentieth century Saigon, Lua Mater – a performance artist – meets Emi Terazawa, a child visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the end of the war. The sudden arrival of a tiny Panda prompts fate to intervene, taking Lua and Emi on a dreamlike and investigative journey into history, language, legacy and resistance.

Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi become one narrator, blending their voices into a performance of intergenerational stories that reach their crescendo with a song for humanity beyond trauma.

by Sophia Terazawa

Tetra Nova is an operatic, polyphonic novel. At its heart lies the question of postcolonial burdens of identity, exile, narration, and history.

In late-twentieth century Saigon, Lua Mater – a performance artist – meets Emi Terazawa, a child visiting her mother’s country for the first time since the end of the war. The sudden arrival of a tiny Panda prompts fate to intervene, taking Lua and Emi on a dreamlike and investigative journey into history, language, legacy and resistance.

Darting between the temples of Nagasaki, the mountains of Tucson, and an island refugee camp off the coast of Malaysia, Lua and Emi become one narrator, blending their voices into a performance of intergenerational stories that reach their crescendo with a song for humanity beyond trauma.

ISBN: 9781068751585
384 pages
Date published: 13/11/2025
Paperback

For Fans Of: Bhanu Kapil, Julio Cortazar, Olga Tokarczuk, Nathaniel Mackey

PRAISE:

In the opening to Sophia Terazawa’s Tetra Nova, an elephant knocks the narrator unconscious. He awakens to a soft skull. Ears on top of his head. The disappearance of his fingers and ankles. All anatomy rearranged. The narrator is a stuffed plush Panda. He falls back asleep, then awakens again: now she’s a human girl. No one warns you about this shape-shifting. Like the body of its stuffed plush narrator Panda, Terazawa’s writing removes the points of articulation in Western storytelling, elevating a joyfully disjointed sensibility in its place. Tetra Nova celebrates the multitude, proving there’s more room for every voice once you break the mould. —The Rumpus

Sophia Terazawa's Tetra Nova is a stunning work that activates embodied and cosmic portals of many kinds. —Bhanu Kapil

Sophia Terazawa’s Tetra Nova is a stellar explosion of fiction’s possibility, a galaxy-scale dreambook whose entanglements of memory, history and fantasy draw the reader into an unforgettable world. This is a prosimetric work of Tetris and telepathy, of yearning, opacity and elemental gathering. From the traumas of recent ancestry and ongoing suffering, Tetra Nova performs a rhythmanalysis of arboreal apparition and feral discovery. Reading this, I experienced spiritual condensation like an atmospheric pressure. I had to read the book in four dimensions. Terazawa’s oracular and tenacious poetics moves at lightspeed to constantly reconfigure its process archive of war, exile, love and resistance. A tour de force in prolifauny and play. —Maria Sledmere

Terazawa pushes and pulses against the limits of the page, dissolving form and illuminating new possibilities of language, history, and time in this unravelling of the legacy of colonialism, genocide, and war in Vietnam. Dazzling, maddening, and dreamlike, Tetra Nova explores the way that violence and love live across multiple generations and temporalities, in a shifting hybrid work that feels truly alive. —Jessica Widner

Sophia Terazawa is the author of three poetry collections, Winter Phoenix (Deep Vellum, 2021), Anon (Deep Vellum, 2023), and the forthcoming Oracular Maladies (Noemi Press, 2026), a finalist for the 2023 Noemi Press Book Award. She has also published two award-winning chapbooks, I AM NOT A WAR (Essay Press, 2016) and Correspondent Medley (Factory Hollow Press, 2019), winner of the 2018 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Tetra Nova is her first novel. She currently teaches poetry and hybrid forms at Virginia Tech, where she continues her practice as a performance artist.

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