Description

“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 hours

Andreas 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

Publisher Review

Dasa 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. -- Lucy Popescu * Europe Now * Its own language compelling, open-ended notwithstanding its apocalyptic images, Belladonna resembles a prose Waste Land, an X-ray of our culture, Ban's fragments, like Eliot's, shored against the ruins of our age. -- Michele Levy * World Literature Today * The novel is multi-faceted, sharp, surprising, darkly and grimly hilarious, relevant to our times, and possesses limitless depth. It also bristles with intelligence and defiance in every paragraph, like an exceptionally erudite and alert porcupine. Belladonna deserves major awards consideration -- Jeff Vandermeer * The Millions * A pensive, provocative novel of history, memory, and our endlessly blood-soaked times by one of the foremost writers to have emerged from the former Yugoslavia . . . An elegant novel of ideas concerning decidedly inelegant topics, empathetic but unforgiving. * Kirkus Reviews * This panoramic work by Drndic is less a novel than a life's worth of reminiscences annotated with photographs and copious footnotes, reminiscent of the works of Aleksandar Hemon and W.G. Sebald . . . This work may well be the national novel of Croatia. * Publishers Weekly. * A very fine novel, wise and brave. Her fiction is very powerful statement fiction, and yet somehow the quality, the humanity, the playfulness actually counters the polemical intent. This is an extraordinary book. -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * Drndic stares directly into the inky sins of us all and doesn't blink. Belladonna is a thrilling book. Unforgettable in the seamless way the author combines the real world and the fictional until it no longer matters because, in the end, all of it is the truth. -- Mark Haber * Quarterly Conversation * This book is literature with a capital L and Drndic is a miracle maker conjuring some optimism from despair and charm amid the grisly -- M. Bartley Seigal * Words Without Borders * You read this generous, angry, and candid novel of ideas in a continuing state of wondrous disquiet . . . Belladonna is brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable. Dasa Drndic achieves her mission, proving that silence cannot erase the past. Memory stalks us, and always triumphs -- Eileen Battersby * Los Angeles Review of Books *