Love Novel

Winner of the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis

Shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us to the frontlines of a war waged between kitchen and bedroom.

He, an unemployed Dante scholar, trying to change the world and write a novel. She, once a passable actress with a vaguely rewarding theater job, now a stay-at-home mom. He is delirious with dreams of grandeur; she is on edge, a detonator bomb with a dirty laundry trigger. The rent is late, the neighbor caviling, the government astoundingly callous: with violence looming on all sides, husband and wife circle one another in a dizzying dance towards the abyss.

Intense and astutely ironic, devastating and darkly comic, Ivana Sajko's Love Novel takes a scalpel to the heart of modern married life.