Belladonna

Winner of 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in TranslationFrom the author of the highly acclaimedTrieste, a fierce novel about history, memory, and illnessAndreas Ban, a psychologist who no longer psychologizes, a writer who no longer writes, lives alone in a coastal town in Croatia. His body is failing him. He sifts through the remnants of his lifehis research, books, medical records, photographsremembering old lovers and friends, the tragedies of WWII, the breakup of Yugoslavia. Bans memories of Belgrade (which he thought he had left behind) and of Amsterdam (a different world and life) alternate with meditations on hole-ridden time (ebbing away through its perforations), on his measly pension, on growing old and fragile, on the intelligence of rats and the agelessness of lobsters, on deadly nightshade. He tries to push the past away, 'to land on a little island of time in which tomorrow does not exist, in which yesterday is buried. Drndic leafs through the horrors of history with a cold unflinching wit. The past is riddled with holes, she writes. Souvenirs cant help here. And they don't.