Bøger udgivet af Sandorf Passage

The 1964 Sava River flood sets in motion this literary thriller and then sweeps away everything before it. With Water, Spiderweb Nada Gasic cements her reputation as both a spellbinding author and a remarkable chronicler of the city she calls home: Zagreb, Croatia. An eccentric cast of marginalized characters, from a mentally ill man who channels the Virgin Mary to three sisters cast from a disfigured version of the Cinderella fairy tale, this novel is not so much about crimes committed but rather the questions around why these crimes are committed, on an individual level and on a societal level. In piecing together the clues that may or may not answer these questions, Gasic makes clear that we are the ones responsible for the circumstances that yield the deaths of the innocent.

Set in Trieste, Italy, but spanning as far as Australia, Federica Marzi's meditation on emigration, loss, love, and identity weaves together a multigenerational story about how hard it can be to let the wounds of the past heal. Against the summery backdrop of rugged Adriatic Sea coastline, Amila, a young Bosnian, and Norina, an elderly exile from the region of Istria in Croatia enter one another's lives. As a blooming youthful love forces Amila to keep secrets, the bitterness of another from decades earlier tears apart two sisters. In the forced and anticipated departures and arrivals that power My Home Somewhere Else, stories of emigration reveal just how much people share in common in their completely separate lives.

Bea Vianen rose to prominence as a writer in both her native Suriname and its European colonizer, the Netherlands, with the publication of My Name is Sita in 1969. Set in the 1950s in the Caribbean Dutch colony during an era of social and ethnic turmoil, this coming-of-age novel shadows Sita, a young East Indian girl, as she copes with the loss of her mother and defends herself against her father's many mistakes, while also trying to care for her younger brother and carve out a life for herself in a staunchly rigid culture. Beneath the festering, lush, and humid tropical setting, Sita's struggles only become more difficult with her best friend's departure and an unwanted pregnancy. Now considered a contemporary Dutch classic, My Name is Sita makes it all too clear what women have had to, and continue to, sacrifice in the name of claiming their identity.

It's 1481, and as seen from the centers of power in Rome and Venice, the cultures of Europe are under threat from the expansion of the Ottoman Empire. When the exalted Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror dies his eldest son, Bayezid, takes the throne. However, discontented factions within the Ottoman army urge Mehmed's second son, Cem, a well-educated and experienced warrior, to oppose his brother's ascension, setting off a ruthless power struggle and forcing Cem into long years of exile, a pawn for European powers that are struggling to maintain the order they have imposed on the continent over the course of centuries. The Case of Cem, Vera Mutafchieva's sprawling novel of court intrigue, maintains lasting resonance for being a personal exploration of emigration and loss as told through the historical era during which the politics of the East and West were sketched out with utter clarity. These early lines of demarcation, as voiced through Christian and Muslim emissaries, power hungry rulers, unflinching warriors, and poets, have indelibly influenced the word as we know it today.

Sebastijan Pregelj's award-winning novel, In Elvis's Room, tells the turbulent story of Slovenian independence from the perspective of Jan, an only child growing up in Ljubljana. Jan's life in 1980s Yugoslavia is idyllic, filled with family outings, Star Wars, and good friends. But as Jan gets older, and the ties that have held together Yugoslavia begin to tatter, the contours of life change. He and his friends, Elvis and Peter, are bullied walking to and from school, because Elvis is Muslim and Peter is a bookworm. The friends stand by one another, strengthening not only their friendships but those of the families, particularly Elvis's. Jan spends many happy hours with Elvis's family, but then he is called up for military service and good times are replaced with whispers about religion and purges. In Elvis's Room confronts history--both its beauty and horror--without hiding anything, and in doing so tells a highly nuanced, emotionally-charged story about living with memories from a country that no longer exists and what it requires of individuals to carry that immense weight.

In Kindness Separates Night From Day, Marija Dejanovic "looks at herself from a distance until she recognizes herself." This collection is a marvel of refined verse that explores the concept of the eternal stranger: the self. As a deeply perceptive witness with a passion for reflection, Dejanovic's ideas unfold and bloom throughout as memory and history surface in the present, and recast it, to awaken readers from the slumber of self-evident happiness and make clear with crystalline imagery the beneficial truths of harsh realities.

Peter Zilahy's The Last Window-Giraffe takes its title from the fact that the first and last letters of the Hungarian alphabet match the first letters for the words "window" and "giraffe." This genre-defying book, originally written in Hungarian, has been translated into twenty-two languages and is often cited as one of the inspirations for the Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. On the surface, this autobiographical fiction rendered by Zilahy's incisive x-ray vision--a heady mix of history, memoir, and farce of the highest order--is about the protests in Belgrade in 1996. But viewed through a wider lens it serves up the absurdity of all manner of authoritarianism that resonates as much today as it first did upon publication in 1999.

"The President Shop is a marvelous, timeless book that sweeps between the personal and the panoramic as it asks, Does every family, or country, contain an axis, around which the rest of it spins? Can you hear the voice of a stone? How clearly can anyone see the past or future? For which tyrannies have we been unwittingly waving flags?" --Catherine Lacey, author of Pew and Certain American States The President, the founder of the Nation, is an old man now, but his young and unifying spirit stands steadfastly at the heart of The President Shop, Vesna Maric's debut novel. Images of and tributes to the President are found in all homes in the Nation, procured from stores like the one Ruben and Rosa run. The couple met as partisans, fighting to forge the Nation in the crucible of conflict. But even though their pride shines as brightly as the gilded bust of the President, the younger generation has questioned whether the Nation really has its citizens best interests in mind. Ruben's brother is actively working to avoid mandatory military service as he pines away for another man, and Ruben and Rosa's daughter Mona is too busy adjusting to womanhood to get caught up in state-mandated nostalgia. To further exacerbate the family tension, an elderly uncle claims to have invented a machine to see into the future, which he stores in the basement of the family's apartment building. But there is no telling what the future really holds in store as the beliefs of the past slowly start to crumble.

In Johannesburg, South Africa, two strangers, both of them from other countries, struggle to fulfill the dreams that urged them to leave home. Osas puts what little he has into ascertaining the papers that will permit him to enter South Africa from his homeland of Nigeria, only to learn that life has dealt him another harsh blow. With no other prospects, he befriends a fellow countryman, a known criminal. Chamai, a Canadina-Zimbabwean has come to South Africa to further his education, but when his financial resources dry up, he turns to sex work to make enough money to eat. In The Strangers of Braamfontein, Onyeka Nwelue pits the aspirations of those always striving for more against the realities of the immigrant experience.

Delivered like a fable, A Cat At the End of the World shifts perspectives between a runaway slave and the Scatterwind, a bodiless spirit that moves effortlessly through time and space, from the days of ancient Syracuse to our contemporary era. At the center of their stories is Miu, an Egyptian cat-- one of the earliest to be domesticated-- through whom Robert Peris ic channels a deeply profound and beautiful understanding of animal and human behaviors as seen through the results of language, warfare, colonization, trade, and the building of a society.

With unapologetic vividness, Lejla Kalamujic depicts pre- and post-war Sarajevo by charting a daughter coping with losing her mother, but discovering herself. From imagined conversations with Franz Kafka to cozy apartments, psychiatric wards, and cemeteries, Call Me Esteban is a piercing meditation on a woman grasping at memories in the name of claiming her identity.

In the Nigerian language Igbo "iberibe" means "messed up." This stunning short story collection by Kasimma grabs readers and pulls them into the cities and villages of today's Nigeria. Against the glare of smart phone screens, spirits of the dead flicker, elders admonish their grown children, rituals are done in secret, and the scars of war are just below the surface in the lives of astonishingly vivid characters. Kasimma's stories effortlessly inhabit the dark, alluring, and beautiful spaces between mystical Nigerian traditions and our strange contemporary condition.

"In From Nowhere to Nowhere Bekim Sejranovic gives us the elegiac beauties echoing over the vanishing times and places, inviting us to reflect and at the same time to relish funky flashes of memory." --Josip Novakovich, author of April Fool's Day and Man Booker International Prize finalist Bekim Sejranovic's From Nowhere to Nowhere is a subtle yet unforgettable meditation on the factors that shape identity. The novel's unnamed narrator, raised by his grandparents and scattered to the wind from his hometown of Brcko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, travels to Croatia and Norway, trying to reclaim a sense of self he isn't sure he ever possessed in the first place. From his days playing soccer with friends on Unity Street outside his home to Muslim funerals, his job as an interpreter for Balkan refugees, and his fractious relationships with women, a nomadic aesthetic emerges brilliantly rendering what it means to live a life from which you have always been removed.

When Miroslav Krleza traveled through Russia for six months between the end of 1924 and the beginning of 1925, the celebrated Croatian writer was there to figure out what it all meant. The sprawling country was still coming to terms with the events of the 1917 revolution and reeling from Lenin's death in January 1924. During this period of profound political and social transition, Krleza opened his senses to train stations, cities, and villages and collected wildly different Russian perspectives on their collective moment in history. Krleza's impressionistic reportage of mass demonstrations and jubilant Orthodox Easter celebrations is informed by his preoccupation with the political, social, and psychological complexities of his environment. The result is a masterfully crafted modernist travelogue that resonates today as much as it did when first published in 1926.

Ivana Bodrozic's In a Sentimental Mood is emotional, but never woeful, deliberate, yet playful poetry capable of reaching both the highest and deepest registers of expression. From abstract jazz-inspired musings to bedroom intimacies, these poems converse with the idea that being alone is not the worst thing that can happen to a person. To lose your dignity and the dignity of your words--that is the worst thing.