Mima Simić

'. every departure is a little death, every departure always clings to what it leaves behind, and every one deserves its own photo, its own legend .' A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin by a gesture of violence. As the wheels turn, his mind roams free in a feverish attempt to trace the genealogy of that violence in his own past and that of Europe as a whole.
A man in search of a destination where he can be a stranger - but has that better place since ceased to exist? Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family divided by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin - yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. A profound novel of contemporary Europe in the stark and furious voice of Dublin Prize-shortlisted Ivana Sajko, powerfully translated by Mima Simic.