"Trieste is a monumental feat of the imagination. Impassioned and lucid, it is impossible to read it and not come away with a new understanding of the world. Dasa Drndic has given us a masterpiece that is not only brilliant, but uncompromisingly humane. How lucky we are" MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize

"Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece" A.N. Wilson, Financial Times

"Trieste is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick" Craig Seligman, New York Times

An old woman sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy. She is waiting to be reunited with her son. He was fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her sixty-two years before by the Nazi authorities during the German occupation.

By focusing on the experiences of one individual, Drndic engages head-on with the traumatic history of WWII and the Holocaust and deals unsparingly with the massacre of Jews in Trieste's concentration camp.

A literary collage comprising photographs, scraps of poetry, interviews and testimonies from the Nuremberg Trials, it is a formally daring work of immense power and scope.

Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac

About the Author
Dasa 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. Dasa Drndic died in June 2018.

Reviews
Trieste is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick. -- Craig Seligman * New York Times *
Trieste is a monumental feat of the imagination. Impassioned and lucid, it is impossible to read it and not come away with a new understanding of the world. Dasa Drndic has given us a masterpiece that is not only brilliant, but uncompromisingly humane. How lucky we are. -- MAAZA MENGISTE * author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize *
'Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary ... It is a masterpiece' A.N. Wilson, Financial Times. * Financial Times *
'Original, moving and beautifully translated and produced' Guardian. * Guardian *
'A literary tour-de-force' Amanda Hopkinson, Independent. * Independent *
'The multifarious elements that comprise Haya's story and its grand context are an incredibly dense and potent mixture' Daniel Dahn, Independent on Sunday. * Independent on Sunday *


Awards
Long-listed for Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013.



Book Information
ISBN 9781780878355
Author Dasa Drndic
Format Paperback
Page Count 368
Imprint MacLehose Press
Publisher Quercus Publishing
Weight(grams) 260g
Dimensions(mm) 197mm * 130mm * 23mm