‘If I was still wondering about people at my age, I wouldn’t be able to brush my teeth’. Alina Bronsky resurrects a lost world in her new novel. In a funny, smart and heartbreaking manner she tells the story about a village, that’s not supposed to exit anymore and an extraordinary woman who finds her own paradise.
Baba Dunja is a Chernobyl returnee. Where the rest of the world fears the radiant forest fruits after the reactor accident, the former nurse and like-minded people rebuild a new life in no man’s land. There is water from the well, electricity on good days and vegetables from the garden. Birds sing louder than anywhere else and spiders weave crazy nets. While the very ill Petrov reads love poems in the hammock and the milkmaid Marja flirts with Sidorow, who is almost a hundred years of age, Baba Dunja writes letters to her daughter Irina, a surgeon in Germany. But then a stranger comes to the village and the community is threatened again. With this story, Alina Bronsky, full of power and poetry, full of heart and wit succeeds in creating a fairytale yet captivating current story.
Excerpts from the novel will be read in both English and German.
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