Sal, the protagonist of 'Sun Alley', is an exceptionally intelligent twelveyearold boy, experiencing his first love. One summer afternoon, on his way to see his girlfriend Emi, he is caught in a rain shower and shelters in the hallway of a block of flats. Led by a strong odour, he goes down into the basement, where he comes upon the corpse of a young and very beautiful woman. Little by little, Sal will attempt to discover the mystery o ...
'The Son' follows one night in the life of a hero with no name, a writer whose life is falling apart. That afternoon, his wife left him, while for many years he has been in conflict with his father, who blames him for his mother s death. Incapable of finding inner calm, he leaves into the warm, Mediterranean night, in the city of Ulcinj, itself a multilayered mixture of European dimensions, African influences, and the communist past. T ...
In a small town on the Adriatic coast, a local detective is content to sacrifice truth for the sake of telling his clients the stories they want to hear. At first, The Coming reads as a traditional detective novel, but suddenly changes form with the advent of snow in midsummer. When the town library burns down under mysterious circumstances, the detective s longlost son begins to get involved in the investigations from afar. He takes the reader ...
A stunning, unique and deadly serious exploration of the roots and results of the Bosnian civil war of the early 1990s. Magical realism Balkan style: complete with some of the most terrifying characters of fantasy fiction. ...
Appalling and tragic, Ognjen Spahic's exceptional short novel animates the misery of Ceasescu's Romania and its inglorious fall with a metaphor fully up to the task: leprosy. Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen was a Norwegian scientist who isolated the Mycobacterium leprae in 1873 and his 'children' are the tragic sufferers of this ghastly disease. In Spahic's novel, it's 1989 and a dozen of them are confined to the last ...
A tender and revealing set of stories by the uniquely delicate Bosnian writer, Alma Lazarevska. Avoiding the easy traps of politics and blame, Lazarevska reveals a world full of incidents and worries so similar to our own, and yet always under the shadow of the snipers and the bombs that we know are out there and that occasionally impinge on the story in shocking ways. One of the finest works to have emerged from the tragedy that was the siege o ...
A witty, wonderful collection of short stories with a distinctly feminine, erotic flavour. With a selection of wonderful characters; from Elvis impersonators to cat lovers, Lengold takes the reader on a charming ride in this prizewinning collection. ...
Here is the life of an ordinary Turkish man, a master tambour player of local fame, whose life stretches from Istanbul to Beirut because of his obsessive love for Maryam. We witness the fading of this love with the passage of time and changing of circumstances, bringing us closer to this man than to many other modern protagonists. ...
The story of Ekaterini is the story of one woman who lives through the twentieth century in a part of the world where a long life could bear witness to four major wars. This is history seen from the woman's point of view, the story of the ordinary lives of the women who live through the turbulent historical events of their time. ...
