A novel built from memory, testimony, archival records, photographs, lists and historical documents, centred on Haya Tedeschi, an elderly Jewish woman in Gorizia waiting for the return of the son taken from her during the Second World War.

There's a birds eye view of Fascist Italy and Nazi occupation, using real names and biographies to contest the written history. So there's testimony intrerrupting invention; bureaucratic records sit beside family memory; enormous historical machinery is continually brought back to individual bodies and choices. There is something of W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn in its associative movement through documents, though Drndić is far more confrontational. Where Sebald often circles history through melancholy and digression, Drndić keeps dragging the archive into the room and asking who was there, what they knew, and what was permitted to disappear into forgetting. Formally bold, furious and devastating, it is as much an investigation of historical memory and complicity as it is a novel.

MacLehose Press, 2013 paperback. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać. Very good used condition, with light wear to the cover and edges.