World Readers' Award 2016 Winner, The New York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2015. Beauty Is A Wound opens with the sentence, "One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years." The story weaves history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past: the rapacious greed of colonialism, the struggle for independence and the three decades of Suharto's despotic rule.