Panorama

Dušan Šarotar is a Slovenian writer, essayist, literary critic and editor. He was born in the town of Murska Sobota in northeastern Slovenia. He studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. He has published several essays and columns in renowned Slovenian journals, such as Mladina, Nova revija, and Sodobnost.[2] His best known novel is Billiards at the Hotel Dobray (Bilijard v Dobrayu), an account of the persecution of Jews in Murska Sobota at the end of the Second World War from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor returning from a concentration camp. The novel, first published in Slovene in 2007, is based on the story of Šarotar's grandfather.

"The hydraulic ebb and flow of Panorama s sentence waves subsumes the role of narration. . . Giving oneself to these meditative rhythms represents the true depth and joy of this novel--and it is a spiritual joy." --World Literature Today"This is not a novel in which anything happens; it has all happened already, catastrophically, and the condition of exile is the only place from which one can achieve peace or perspective. This is what I think this marvellous book is telling us." --Nicholas Lezard, Guardian"A meditation on loss and change ... and on time, migration, language, ocean, love and war. It is densely compacted: its two hundred or so pages seem to expand much as a paper flower from childhood did when put in water." --Stephen Watts