Bullaun Press – förlag

Two tales of exile intertwined into a profound double portrait, Forgottenness painstakingly traces parallels between the historical and the contemporary, between the collective and the individual, between the histories of two people born on the same day, a century apart. The narrator, a writer grappling with her growing anxiety and obsessive thoughts, becomes fixated on Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882-1931), a once significant figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence who has since fallen into oblivion, into the gaping mouth of Time. As she plunges into her nation's history to come to terms with her own, we slowly uncover the complex relationship between time, memory and identity to confront the question - what does it mean to remember?

The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own.This is La Reunion in the 1980s: high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. One little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents' reign of terror and turns to school for salvation. Rich in the history of the island's customs and superstitions, and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirize the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you.'A novel that is as beautiful as it is brutal. Life in La Reunion is described in brilliantly vivid, unflinching, and at times, humorous prose. This is a story that will transport you across the world with its incredible narrator, characters and places, but despite the distance, our narrator does what great voices do: whispers, we are all the same.' Kevin Curran, author of Youth'Vivacious and mordantly funny, the tragicomic voice of There's a Monster Behind the Door is forensically and brilliantly merciless.' Wendy Erskine'Harsh, hilarious, spine chilling and heart warming - an unmissable French debut.' Michelle Gallen'A tour-de-force as volcanic as the little island of La Reunion, a tiny sliver of France marooned in the Indian Ocean, "a heap of rubble on the edge of the world". The narrator of Gaelle Belem's novel, a little girl no-one wanted, the unloved daughter of the Dessaintes, is determined to be someone, to tell the story of her family, and through them the story of an island founded on slavery, poverty, cruelty and superstition with a caustic wit and a keen eye. It is a tragi-comedy worthy of Zola, candid and unflinching, yet shot through with humour and poignancy and even a glimmer of hope. Belem's novel is a joyous discovery and in Laetitia Saint-Loubert and Karen Fleetwood she has found translators alert to the nuances of French and Creole and to the poetry threaded through this startling debut.' Frank Wynne, translator, 2022 International Booker Prize - chair of the judges

1829. Sainte-Suzanne, Bourbon Island. A Black orphan, a slave of only seven weeks, is placed – as if by fate – into the arms of Ferréol Beaumont, a botanist with a passion for orchids. He raises this child, Edmond, teaching him all he knows of the lush plants that populate his tropical garden. At twelve years old, the illiterate young prodigy unlocks the secret to hand-pollinating the vanilla orchid, revolutionizing not only the island’s economy but French patisserie, perfumes & more. While his discovery brings prosperity to others, the exhilarating aroma of the vanilla flower soon dissipates for Edmond as a bitter reality stretches out before him – his brilliance unrecognized, his name forgotten.A caustic look at the nineteenth-century history of Reunion Island under French colonial rule. For lovers of history, botany and vanilla ice cream.

Loodeen Winders - Lewy, six years of age - is growing up sharp. It's the turbulent early 1920s in a market town in the west of Ireland. Free State soldiers patrol in front of the Workhouse. Lewy's worried about his father's car being commandeered again. The nuns loom over Lewy and his classmates, amongst them the orphans - those shadowy figures, 'slobbery and weak and raggy'.Encounters with Violet and 'Brazenface' Rosaleen McInally in the woods play on Lewy's mind, even while he's trying to fathom the death of his beloved Grandfather. For a treat he goes behind the screen at the Pictures where his father creates the sound effects with his 'Jazzdrums' for the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Lewy's mother works magic on the sewing machine and picks up the pieces when things get out of hand - like the time he breaks his arm walking the wire in their backyard circus.On the fortieth anniversary of Eoghan O Tuairisc's death, this is the first appearance in English of the frank, funny voice of Lewy, a vital witness of his place and time.

Loodeen Winders – Lewy, six years of age – is growing up sharp. It''s the turbulent early 1920s in a market town in the west of Ireland. Free State soldiers patrol in front of the Workhouse. Lewy''s worried about his father''s car being commandeered again. The nuns loom over Lewy and his classmates, amongst them the orphans – those shadowy figures, ''slobbery and weak and raggy''.Encounters with Violet and ''Brazenface'' Rosaleen McInally in the woods play on Lewy''s mind, even while he''s trying to fathom the death of his beloved Grandfather. For a treat he goes behind the screen at the Pictures where his father creates the sound effects with his ''Jazzdrums'' for the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Lewy''s mother works magic on the sewing machine and picks up the pieces when things get out of hand – like the time he breaks his arm walking the wire in their backyard circus.On the fortieth anniversary of Eoghan Ó Tuairisc''s death, this is the first appearance in English of the frank, funny voice of Lewy, a vital witness of his place and time.

Sifting through memories, simple scenes nestled into one another like her own beloved wooden doll, the Matryoshka, Maja struggles to unearth her identity. She is marked by a lingering absence - of homeland, mother tongue, mother, warmth. Raised in an unfamiliar country by her taciturn aunt, Maja has brief moments of connection with her fading past such as through her childhood friendship with Marek, a Polish refugee with his own stories of love and loss in the face of war and displacement. An adult Maja finds herself again and again on the outside of her relationships with others, and with herself. This poetic, yet unadorned, account invites an open-ended exploration of the relationship between language and identity.

Sifting through memories, simple scenes nestled into one another like her own beloved wooden doll, the Matryoshka, Maja struggles to unearth her identity. She is marked by a lingering absence – of homeland, mother tongue, mother, warmth.Raised in an unfamiliar country by her taciturn aunt, Maja has brief moments of connection with her fading past such as through her childhood friendship with Marek, a Polish refugee with his own stories of love and loss in the face of war and displacement. An adult Maja finds herself again and again on the outside of her relationships with others, and with herself. This poetic, yet unadorned, account invites an open-ended exploration of the relationship between language and identity.

Two tales intertwined in a profound double portrait, Forgottenness painstakingly traces parallels between the historical and the contemporary, the collective and the individual, between the stories of two people born on the same day, a century apart.The narrator, a writer grappling with her growing anxiety and obsessive thoughts, becomes fixated on Viacheslav Lypynskyi (1882–1931), a once-significant figure in the struggle for Ukrainian independence who has since fallen into oblivion, into the gaping mouth of Time.As she plunges into her nation''s history to come to terms with her own, we slowly uncover the complex relationship between time, memory and identity to confront the question – what does it mean to remember?

The name Dessaintes is one to reckon with. A bombastic, violent and increasingly dangerous clan, little do they know that their downfall is being chronicled by one of their own.This is La Reunion in the 1980s: high unemployment and low expectations, the legacy of postcolonialism. One little girl makes a bid for escape from her sadistic parents'' reign of terror and turns to school for salvation.Rich in the history of the island''s customs and superstitions, and driven by a wild, offbeat humour, this picaresque tale manages to satirize the very notion of freedom available in this French territory, and perhaps even the act of writing itself and where it might lead you.

Between the stifling atmosphere of New York City and the fog-covered mountains of Negueira de Muniz, What Remains follows a young Galician student researching the Franco regime's vast project of forced resettlement. In the 1950s, more than half the inhabitants of the villages in Negueira de Muniz, Galicia, were driven from their land in a brutal experiment to turn 'backward' country people into modern cattle farmers.Amid the weight of unsettling archival documents, the voices of the displaced, and a sweltering New York summer, the unnamed narrator discovers the mysterious story of a woman who disappeared from her settlement without a trace. As he pieces together her strange fate, he confronts his own temporary status in a foreign land and wonders what it means to call a place home.Intimate and dreamlike, What Remains is a meditation on the ruins of memory and an urgent exploration of identity, colonialism, and resistance. Inventively blending memoir, fiction, anthropology and travel writing, the novel investigates, with surprising intuition, the traces left in the places we inhabit.

Ryna comes home from abroad to the wake of her granny Darafeya in Nauhalnaye, a village in the drained marshlands near Lipen, in a remote corner of Belarus. That night as Ryna sits alone with the coffin, Darafeya, who lived to be a hundred, tells one last story. She and her grandmother, one-eyed Maryanka, known as the 'whisperers', managed to survive several brutal regimes, feared and respected by their neighbours for their powers of healing and witchcraft. Caustic; harrowing, yet leavened with black humour, What Now, Mr Wolf? offers an unforgettable oral testimony of the dark days of recent European history. Ryna, prisoner of her grandmother Darafeya's memories of relentless violence, tries to make her peace with them and remake a life for herself in this troubled place.