Bøger af Dasa Drndic

In the 1990s, the unnamed narrator of Battle Songs leaves Yugoslavia with her daughter Sara to Toronto to start a new life. They, along with other refugees, encounter a new country but not a new home. Book editors sell hotdogs, mathematicians struggle to get by on social security, violinists hawk cheap goods on the street. Years after arriving in Canada, when she thinks no one can hear her, Sara still sings in the shower: What can we do to make things better, what can we do to make things better, la-la-la-la.In true Drndic style, the novel has no one time or place. It is interspersed with stories from the Yugoslav Wars, from Rijeka to Zagreb to Sarajevo-with, as always, the long shadow of the Second World War looming overhead. Her singular layering of details-from lung damage to silk scarves to the family budget to old romances-offers an almost unbearable closeness to the characters and their moment in history. "Wry and kindly, funny, angry, informed and intent on the truth, no voice is quite as blisteringly beautiful as that of Drndic" (Financial Times).

Two elderly people, Artur and Isabella, meet and have a passionate sexual encounter on New Year's Eve. Details of the lives of Artur, a retired Yugoslav army captain, and Isabella, a Holocaust survivor, are revealed through police dossiers. As they fight loneliness and aging, they take comfort in small things: for Artur, a collection of 274 hats; for Isabella, a family of garden gnomes who live in her apartment. Later, we meet the ill-fated Pupi, who dreamed of becoming a sculptor but instead became a chemist and then a spy. As Eileen Battersby wrote, "As he stands, in the zoo, gazing at a pair of rhinos, in a city most likely present-day Belgrade, this battered Everyman feels very alone: 'I would like to tell someone, anyone, I'd like to tell someone: I buried Mother today.'" Pupi sets out to correct his family's crimes by returning silverware to its original Jewish owners through the help of an unlikely friend, a pawnbroker.Described by Dasa Drndic as "my ugly little book," Doppelgänger was her personal favorite.

Financial Times Book of the Year An urgent new novel about death, war, and memory from the highly acclaimed Croatian writer

"Splendid and absorbing . . . [Drndic] is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick . . . These dense and satisfying pages capture the crowdedness of memory." - New York Times Book Review Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler's clandestine Lebensborn project. Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family's experiences, in a narrative that deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy. "Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece." - A. N. Wilson, Financial Times "A book of events that have made the last century infamous for the ages, a book that, if it moves you as it moved me, you will have to set down now and then, to breathe." - Alan Cheuse, NPR

A woman searches for identity amidst the deviation of war and the dislocation of immigration. Drndic's characteristic irony and sense of the weight of history set the prose alight. A book for all times.

A bristling follow-on from Belladonna - shortlisted for both the EBRD Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

A timely parable on the perils of growing old and infirm in an unforgiving modern world - by the author of the acclaimed Trieste

Doppelganger consists of two stories that skillfully revisit the question of "doubles" and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society.