Description

A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST NEW DEBUT

Olga Pavic’s house has been requisitioned.
The council will bulldoze it.
Her home will become a monument to a massacre.

But Olga cannot ascertain which massacre. Three different architects visit, each with a proposal to construct a different monument, to memorialise a different horror.

Olga can’t allow them to unearth the secrets held in this space, not until she reunites with her children for a final dinner. Her aspirational, distant daughter, Hilde, and her secretly queer son, Danilo, both reluctantly agree to fly back to Belgrade.

Within an atmosphere of razor-sharp political surreality, Lara Haworth spins a tender, magical story of familial love and loss. Via a panoply of perspectives Monumenta compellingly and playfully explores remembrance and how tragedy can be the catalyst for remarkable transformation.

Publisher Review

Absurdist and humane, this is a laser-sharp work of concentrated brilliance. Encompassing family and history, politics and love, Monumenta is surprising, original and so assured — WENDY ERSKINE A haunting read about all manner of love and loss, remembering and forgetting. I could not put it down — KIRSTY WARK Every image is charged with meaning; every word bears the weight of history. Hallucinatory, haunting . . . Lara Haworth is an important new voice in European literature — CLARE POLLARD A gem of genuine absurdism, and one that moves so unpredictably along its own structure, touching on – banging on, and knocking down – the fundamentals of buildings and trauma, family and love, reason and history, in a stunning, witty kick of literary brilliance — HOLLY PESTER Surreal, quirky, playful and serious . . . This slip of a book takes us to contemporary Belgrade and explores, with imagination and dark humour, how painful pasts are dealt with personally and publicly, asking questions about the roles of memorialisation, memory, erasure, transformation, grief and healing — PRISCILLA MORRIS Monumenta is . . . a very apt book, it fits right here, meaning now and I read it in one sitting. This is a party I’m glad I was invited to — EILEEN MYLES Full of fresh and witty descriptions, featuring incisively drawn characters, about personal and political memory, and how each wrestles with the other. About how the past nourishes yet also throttles the present. About the impossibility of escape from either one’s history or one’s destiny — TIM PEARS Monumenta is by turns a ghost story, a family drama, a sociopolitical satire – but it’s also thrillingly original: a novel unlike any other I’ve ever read, peopled with characters I’ll never forget — NEIL D. A. STEWART This slight book is a substantial achievement. Lara Haworth is an exciting new voice in literary fiction — MATT ROWLAND HILL Marvellous . . . [Lara Haworth’s] prose is so swift, full of wisdom and wit — SHARON THESEN