Dark Mother Earth

An amnesiac writer’s life of lies and false memories reaches a breaking point in this stunning English-language debut from an award-winning Croatian author.

As a novelist, Matija makes things up for a living. Not yet thirty, he’s written two well-received books. It’s his third that is as big a failure as his private life. Unable to confine his fabrications to fiction, he’s been abandoned by his girlfriend over his lies. But all Matija has is invention. Especially when it comes to his childhood and the death of his father. Whatever happened to Matija as a young boy, he can’t remember. He feels frightened, angry, and responsible…

Now, after years of burying and reinventing his past, Matija must confront it. Longing for connection, he might even win back the love of his life. But discovering the profound fears he has suppressed has its risks. Finally seeing the real world he emerged from could upend it all over again.

Kristian Novak is a Croatian writer, linguist, and university professor. His novel Dark Mother Earth was awarded the Tportal Prize for Croatian Novel of the Year and was named one of the ten best Croatian novels in the last fifty years by Večernji list. The novel was successfully adapted for the stage, and a film adaptation is in the works. Novak is also the author of The Hanged and Gypsy, Yet So Beautiful, which was the recipient of the Gjalski Prize. Dark Mother Earth is his English-language debut.

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers for thirty years. She is the recipient of the 2006 ALTA National Translation Award, an American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Award, and the Mary Zirin Prize for her book Translating Evidence and Interpreting Testimony at a War Crimes Tribunal: Working in a Tug-of-War. A contributing editor to the online literary journal Asymptote, Elias-Bursac spent more than six years at the ex-Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as a translator/reviser in the English Translation Unit. Her translation of Daša Drndić’s novel Trieste was short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2013.