Name: Kakorkoli
Price: 29 EUR
Availability: SoldOut
ISBN: 9789612840075

No Matter How

Kakorkoli

Polona Glavan

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Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2014
Number of pages:: 450
Rights sold:: Croatia (HENA COM), N. Macedonia (Vostok)
Available reading materials:: English sample translation, German sample translation

Polona Glavan’s critically acclaimed novel follows two parallel narrative strands, with chapters alternating between the voices of 17-year-old Lili and university student Alja. As Lili, a high school student from an underprivileged background, deals with an unplanned pregnancy, 20-year-old Alja is trying to bridge the distance between her and David, who she met during a summer backpacking in Ireland. Both Lili and Alja soon realise that the world around them is much bigger and much more complex than their love lives, and while the first half of the novel deals with the girls’ personal problems, the second half takes on a certain social urgency. Through tutoring, Alja meets 13-year-old Senad who lives in abject poverty with his Bosnian family. Appalled at the conditions they live in, she joins an activist group that fights for minority rights. Meanwhile, Lili’s older boyfriend Mars loses his job after an outburst against an immigrant. The paths of the two protagonists cross in a brief but fatal moment when they find themselves head-to-head at the same street protest. This chance meeting marks the end of the world as they know it, with both their lives forever changed.

Longlisted for the Kresnik Award for best novel of the year 2015

Shortlisted for the Kritiško sito Award for best book of the year 2015

No Matter How is a well thought-out, complex work that initially attracts the reader with its language, which the author uses to define the two main characters, giving them their own, unique voices, and then goes on to present an intelligent storyline that increasingly veers from the personal towards the public and holds up a mirror to today’s society.

LUD Literatura
No Matter How by Polona Glavan is a powerful work dealing with social justice, an animated story that restores, in a manner unique to the author, the now-stale enthusiasm of recent protests: the desire for change and the conviction that it is still possible, in spite of everything.

Pogledi
As Glavan doesn’t intrude on her own story to preach about right and wrong, the reader is free from any compulsion to interpret the story in one way or another until the very last page of the book. However, this doesn’t mean that the author leaves us uninterested; on the contrary, the novel consistently challenges us to consider its themes from multiple perspectives and to grow together with both protagonists.

Koridor

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