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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...

Farewell, Cowboy' is a tough yet poetic novel by one of Croatia's best known writers. The story is rich in local colour and sentiment, following the main character, Dada, who returns to her home town on the Adriatic coast in order to unravel the mystery of her brother Daniel's death. Daniel, although young, smart and popular, threw himself under a train in mysterious circumstances a few years earlier. In her search for clues, Dada meets an arr...

The Great War' is a novel that comprehensively and passionately narrates a number of stories covering the duration of World War One, starting with the year 1914 - the year that truly marked the beginning of the twentieth century. Following the destinies of over seventy characters, on all warring sides, Gatalica depicts the experiences of winners and losers, generals and opera singers, soldiers and spies, managing to grasp the atmosphere of the...

This unique and disturbing work concerns the events of 1997, a tragic year in the history of post-communist Albania. After the world's most isolated country emerged from Stalinist dictatorship and opened to capitalism, many people fell prey to fraudsters who invited them to invest in so-called 'pyramid schemes'. At the start of 1997, these pyramids crumbled one after another causing wide-spread demonstrations and protests. The conflict became ...

Exile is a collection of short stories with the tast of a novel. The over-riding theme is the sense of melancholy of those who have been alienated from their homeland, from their families or from society. By offering the reader short, vivid glimpses into other worlds, be they of real or fictional characters, Ilhan builds a patchwork of stories which highlight the lives of the dispossessed. As a woman writing in modern day Turkey, she is not af...

Meet Hedgemond the Hunter, a brave and stubborn little hedgehog. Down in the wild woods he proudly tends to his beloved house, but there are some animals who just can't understand what the fuss is about. Find out just how Hedgemond proves to the grumpy bear and the greedy boar that there is no place like home.

My Father's Dreams is a controversial and shocking novel by Slovenia's bestselling author Evald Flisar, and is regarded by many critics as his best. The book tells the story of fourteen-year-old Adam, the only son of a village doctor and his quiet wife, living in apparent rural harmony. But this is a topsy-turvy world of illusions and hopes, in which the author plays with the function of dreaming and story-telling to present the reader with an...

TILL KINGDOM COMES is ... a compulsively readable mixture of humour and dark fate, Nikolaidis bitterly explodes all Balkan post-Communist myths. After reading it, you will hate life, but in an immensely happy way!" Slavoj Zizek A cynical local reporter discovers that the grandmother who brought him up is actually not his blood relative. Suddenly, the past he has called his own turns out to be a complete fabrication, from the stories of his par...

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 leper house in Europe, an u...

Gabriela Babnik's novel Dry Season breaks the mould of what we usually expect from a writer from a small, Central European nation. With a global perspective, Babnik takes on the themes of racism, the role of women in modern society and the loneliness of the human condition. Dry Season is a record of an unusual love affair. Anna is a 62-year-old designer from Slovenia and Ismael is a 27-year-old from Burkino Faso who was brought up on the stree...

Homunculus is billed as a collection of sixteen 'fairy tales for adults' with something for every reader. The author has largely retained the classical fairy-tale structure with its elements of surprise and the constant intertwining of the real and unreal, but he transcends the sugar-sweet endings we are familiar with. Along with typical fairy-tale features like the interplay of humans and animals, he presents us with a wide range of more matu...

A young man is found lying unconscious on the outskirts of Bucharest. No one knows who he is and everyone has a different theory about how he got there. Within the pages of this charming book, the stories of a variety of characters unfold, each closely interwoven with the next, and outlining the features of what ultimately turns out to be the most important and most powerful character of all: the city of Bucharest itself. The plot of Life Begi...

This is a book that lives in two parts - one set in the Ottoman empire of the 16th century, and the other in our own 21st century reality. Here we have the story of two friends, both taken as children from their homes and inducted into the Turkish Sultan's private guard: Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the Serbian shepherd boy who rose to the position of Grand Vizier and Koca Mimar Sinan, the 'Michelangelo of the East'. Between them they represent both ...

Aziz Bey is at once the most genuine and the saddest of all her heroes. Here we see 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. With the soft touch of an accomplished...

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 long-lost son begins to get involved in the investigations from afar. He takes the read...

The short-sighted adolescent is a poor schoolboy who is in love with literature, and tries to emulate the lives and works of the writers he most admires. He is also fascinated by science and history, and stays up all night reading. At the age of 17 he decides to write a novel to prove to his teachers that he is not as mediocre as his fellow pupils, and is prepared to give up everything in order to do so. The novel is written in a series of not...

Quiet Flows the Una is the story a man trying to overcome the personal trauma caused by the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Through an induced trance, the main character of the novel takes the reader through three time periods: the hero's childhood before the war, the battle lines during the war, and his attempt to continue with normal life in a post-conflict society. Through poetic, meditative prose, sehic attempts to rec...

Set during Byron's famous journey across the Balkans in the aurum of 1809, this is a fictional reimagining of a love affair between the famous poet and a local beauty