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The whole novel breathes with a raw sensibility so aptly captured in the voice of the heroine - a striking, rebellious, overtly feminist and somewhat neurotic young woman.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309233582453,"sku":"9781912545162","price":12.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781912545162_267b66ed-2d18-4d13-b276-192afaa60c93.jpg?v=1786030535"},{"product_id":"9781912545544","title":"The Investigator","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe news of his mother's death finds the writer in Budapest and prompts the opening of an old black box of family mementos. Inevitably, this leads to an unravelling of multi-layered stories and an investigation into everyday lives and times that no longer exists. The Investigator contains everything that has made the author so successful in his homeland: a perfect sense for detail, linguistic precision, a brilliantly polished style. While the novel starts as the search for a lost mother, it soon becomes a story about a country and a people who have passed; an elegy for Yugoslavia as well as a family.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309235384693,"sku":"9781912545544","price":13.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781912545544_ba3fce73-c48f-4044-80b5-56241b70caf1.jpg?v=1786030554"},{"product_id":"9781908236401","title":"Catherine the Great and the Small","description":"\u003cp\u003eCatharine's tragectory in life is accompanied by failures in love, family traumas and an incredible romance with handsome Sinisa. The novel takes us through turbulent times in the Balkan region, from the eighties to the present day, portraying growing up in the twilight of communism, and giving intimate insights into all that happened to the region after that.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCarefully crafted characters and masterful, dynamic storytelling place \u003cem\u003eCatherine the Great and the Small \u003c\/em\u003ein the company of the very best of novels , which speak about the reality of their geographic setting and are remembered for their convincing, strong, maladjusted characters. Catherine is certainly one of them: a powerful female voice seeking her place within her family, among friends, in the cities she lives in, and constructing her unique identity as a daughter, granddaughter, friend, mistress, wife and a mother.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e'The splendid language of this novel is skilfully and vividly translated, and the narrative is compelling. 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Starting at the age of fourteen, Eliade continuously produced works of fiction alongside his academic work.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis volume consists of six of his best short stories, taken from over a 30-year period, starting in 1959 with A Fourteen-Year-Old Photograph – the tale of a distance healing in which the patient claims miracle while the healer admits artifice - and including perhaps his most famous short story, the time-shifting At the Gypsies, and culminating with In the Shadow of a Lily, the last story Eliade is known to have written. Each of these stories is dense with allusions and interwoven with connections and references drawn from the imagination and vast knowledge of a great man. Who knows what secrets they may conceal? 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His father once told him these were his cousins, who had left Albania for Sarajevo during the aftermath of the First World War, sometime around 1918. Their names, and the shared surname Cukali, are handwritten on the back. And so, the dilemma becomes an obsession: Should he write about the writer’s creative paralysis, or should he trace the footsteps of a forgotten family history that began over a century ago in this very city?\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eInevitably, it is the second path that pulls him in—transforming his residency into a journey of excavation, longing, and ancestral memory. Atthis point, the novel splits into two narrative strands that twist and braid like a double helix: the story of a poor family leaving Shkodër with the retreating Austro-Hungarian army in 1918, and the writer’s contemporary search for their descendants in today’s Sarajevo.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe movement in time spans over a century. The movement in space crosses more than 500 kilometres. 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