Published in 1985, Wolf Moon was the first novel that centred on the Spanish Maquis to be published in Spain after Franco’s death in 1975.
JOSÉ OVEJERO
Inventing Love
Translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles
978-0-7206-1949-2 / 224pp / £9.99
Samuel leads a comfortable but uninspiring existence in Madrid, consoling himself among friends who have reached a similar point in life. One night he receives a call. Clara, his lover, has died in a car accident. The thing is, he doesn’t know anyone called Clara.
A simple case of mistaken identity offers Samuel the chance to inhabit another, more tumultuous life, leading him to consider whether, if he invents a past of love and loss, he could even attend her funeral. Unable to resist the chance, Samuel finds himself drawn down a path of lies until he begins to have trouble distinguishing between truth and fantasy. But such is the allure of his invented life that he is willing to persist and in the process create a new version of the present – with little regard for the consequences to himself and to others.
José Ovejero’s existential tale of stolen identity exposes the fictions people weave to sustain themselves in a dehumanizing modern world.
PETER OWEN WORLD SERIES
SEASON 3: SERBIA
FILIP DAVID
The House of Remembering and Forgetting
Translated by Christina Pribichevich Zorić
Introduction by Dejan Djokić
978-0-7206-1973-7 / 160pp / £9.99
To save the young Albert from the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, his father makes a hole in the floor of the cattle truck taking his and other Jewish families to their deaths. He then pushes Albert’s brother Elijah and then Albert through and down on to the tracks, hoping that someone will find and take pity on the two boys in the white winter night. In an attempt to understand the true nature of evil, David shows us that it is necessary to walk in two worlds: the material one in which evil occurs and the alternative world of dreams, premonitions and visions in which we try to come to terms with the dangers around us. With its intricate plot and interweaving of fact and fiction, The House of Remembering and Forgetting grapples with the paradoxical and painful dilemma of whether to choose to remember or to forget.
MIRJANA NOVAKOVIĆ
Fear and His Servant
Translated by Terence McEneny
978-0-7206-1977-5 / 256PP / £9.99
Belgrade seems to have changed in the years since Count Otto von Hausburg last visited the city, and not for the better. Serbia in the eighteenth century is a battleground of empires, with the Ottomans on one side and the Habsburgs on the other. In the besieged capital, Princess Maria Augusta waits for love to save her troubled soul. But who is the strange, charismatic count, and can we trust the story he is telling us? While some call him the Devil, he appears to have all the fears and pettiness of an ordinary man. In this daring and original novel, Novakovic invites her readers to join the hunt for the undead, travelling through history, myth and literature into the dark corners of the land that spawned that most infamous word: vampire.
DANA TODOROVIĆ
The Tragic Fate of Moritz Tóth
Translated by the author
978-0-7206-1983-6 / 160pp / £9.99
Ex-punk Moritz Tóth is languishing in the suburbs when he receives a call from the Employment Office offering him a job as a prompter at the Opera. While trying to cope with the claustrophobia of long confinement in a rudimentary wooden box, struggling to follow Puccini’s Turandot in a language he doesn’t understand, Moritz gradually becomes convinced that he is being pursued by a malevolent force in the hideous person of his neighbour Ezekiel, a.k.a. ‘the Birdman’. In two parallel narratives – one earthly strand detailing the growing paranoia of our reluctant hero and the other, more heavenly one of Tobias Keller, the Moral Issues Adviser with the Office of the Great Overseer – the plot develops in the atmospheric style of Kafka and Bulgakov as Tobias discusses the life path of Moritz with the Disciplinary Committee. As the pieces of the puzzle finally come together and the connection between the two storylines becomes clearer, Todorović, mixing philosophy with first-class storytelling, coaxes us towards a surprising finale.
Darkness and Company Page 26