The Ministry of Pain

Tanja Lucic teaches at the University of Amsterdam and lives on the edge of the city's red light district. She and her pupils, fleeing the violent break-up of their homeland Yugoslavia, have found temporary refuge in the Department of Slavonic Languages. Desperate to make ends meet, many of the students find work at the 'Ministry', a fetish-wear factory in North Amsterdam. Meanwhile, Tanja and her student Igor form a dangerously close relationship that threatens to unleash all the tensions of life in exile. With her sharp and melancholy observations, Dubravka Ugresic illuminates with savage compassion our shared human homelessness.

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'One of the ten greatest writers you've never heard of.' Guardian'A disturbing read that should have you in its thrall.'The Times'Ugresic builds her palace of art out of the blood-soaked debris of politics.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent'This edgy, extraordinary novel ... vividly exposes the isolation, fear and confusion of enforced exile.' Joan Smith, The Sunday Times'Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.' The Washington Post

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Dubravka Ugresic has been compared favourably with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf, and is the recipient of many literary prizes. She entered self-imposed exile when Croatia's late president, Franjo Tudjman, proclaimed Croatia to be 'paradise on earth' in the early 1990s. Other publications include Nobody's Home (1-84659-019-1).

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