'... every departure is a little death, every departure always clings to what it leaves behind, and every one deserves its own photo, its own legend ...' A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin by a gesture of violence. As the wheels turn, his mind roams free in a feverish attempt to trace the genealogy of that violence in his own past and that of Europe as a whole. A man in search of a destination where he can be a stranger - but has that better place since ceased to exist? Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family divided by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin - yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. A profound novel of contemporary Europe in the stark and furious voice of Dublin Prize-shortlisted Ivana Sajko, powerfully translated by Mima Simi¿.

Ivana Sajko, born in Zagreb in 1975, is a writer, theatre director and performer, working in the overlapping fields of literature, performance art and music. She is an author of four highly-praised novels and dozens of political theatre pieces, among which Woman-bomb gained international success. Mima Simi¿ is a Croatian writer, an award-winning film critic, translator and political activist. Her short stories have been included in numerous anthologies and have been adapted for radio, TV and animated film. VQ steht für mutige, emanzipierte, frische Literatur, die in keine Schubladen passt, für Komik und Lyrik, für besondere illustrierte Kinder-, Jugend- und Erwachsenenbücher (Graphic Novels). Wir lieben gute Geschichten, aber auch Grenzgänge, Ungewöhnliches, Experimentelles. Stimmen, die man unter hunderten wiedererkennt.