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Hana Doda is an ambitious literature student in cosmopolitan Tirana. Mark Doda is a raki-drinking, chain-smoking shepherd, living alone deep in the Albanian mountains. In fact, they are the same person. Hana has become Mark, but what will become of the Sworn Virgin when she moves to America?
About the author
Born in Durrës, Albania, Elvira Dones is a novelist, screenwriter and documentary film-maker currently based in the US. After seven novels in Albanian, she wrote the two most recent in Italian, her adopted language: Vergine giurata (Sworn Virgin, 2007) and Piccola guerra perfetta (Small Perfect War, 2010) about the Kosovo war. In her prize-winning documentary on the phenomenon of ¿sworn virgins' in Albania, Dones interviews twelve survivors of the practice, one of whom has recently emigrated to the US, like Hana in the novel. A film of the novel Sworn Virgin is due out in 2014.
Summary
Hana Doda is an ambitious literature student in cosmopolitan Tirana. Mark Doda is a raki-drinking, chain-smoking shepherd, living alone deep in the Albanian mountains. In fact, they are the same person. Hana has become Mark, but what will become of the Sworn Virgin when she moves to America?
