Description

Translated by Christina E. Kramer
Gavdos: a remote island south of Crete, the southernmost
point of Europe, surrounded by an endless expanse of
sea.
To Oksana, who has come from Ukraine with her friends
to recover from illness in the aftermath of Chernobyl, it
seems like a dream to live in a blue-and-white house
with a lemon tree.
To Penelope, a Greek woman who was married off to
an unsuitable man by nuns from the convent where she
spent her teenage years, it is a kind of prison.
Their two narratives, interwoven with other stories – of
the other women of the sparse community, of their own
past lives and loves – are skilfully combined with themes
of otherness and the notions of ‘foreign’ and ‘barbaric’
in this poetic and timely short novel by acclaimed
Macedonian writer Petar Andonovski, winner of the
European Union Prize for Literature.
Translated from Macedonian