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"Belladonna is brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable . . . One of the truly outstanding novels of recent years" EILEEN BATTERSBY, Los Angeles Review of Books** Winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2018**** Shortlisted for the inaugural E.B.R.D. Prize for Literature **** Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize **An excoriating work of fiction that references the twentieth century's darkest hoursAndreas Ban is a writer and a psychologist, an intellectual proper, but his world has been falling apart for years. When he retires with a miserable pension and finds out that he is ill, he gains a new perspective on the debris of his life and the lives of his friends. In defying illness and old age, Andreas Ban is cynical and powerful, and in his unravelling of his own past and the lives of others, he uncompromisingly lays bare a gamut of taboos.
Andreas Ban stands for a true hero of our times; a castaway intellectual of a society which subdues every critical thought under the guise of political correctness.
Belladonna addresses some of the twentieth century's worst human atrocities in a powerful fusion of fiction and reality, the hallmark of one of Europe's finest contemporary writers.
Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth
About the author
Daša Drndic was a distinguished Croatian novelist and playwright. She was also been a translator, and a lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy in Rijeka. Trieste (2012), her first novel to be translated into English, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and has now been translated into many other languages. It was followed by Leica Format (2015) and Belladonna (2017). Belladonna has been shortlisted for both the inaugural EBRD prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and received stunning reviews. Daša Drndic died in June 2018.Celia Hawkesworth was Reader in Serbian and Croatian at University College London. Among her translations are work by Dubravka Ugrešic and Ivo Andric. Her translation of Daša Drndic's Belladonna was a finalist for the inaugural E.B.R.D. Prize in 2018, and shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld
Translation Prize and the Warwick Prize for Translation.
Summary
A timely parable on the perils of growing old and infirm in an unforgiving modern world - by the author of the acclaimed Trieste
Foreword
A timely parable on the perils of growing old and infirm in an unforgiving modern world - by the author of the acclaimed Trieste
Additional text
Daša Drndic interweaves fiction, reality, history, and memory to terrific effect . . . Drndic attacks history with a novelist's sensibility and has produced a poignant meditation on love and loss, the insanity of war and the legacy of human cruelty.
