Name: September
Price: 24.9 EUR
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9789612985127

September

Ana Schnabl

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2024
Number of pages:: 284
Rights sold:: Croatia (Fraktura), UK (Divided Publishing)
Available reading materials:: English and German sample translations

September is not just a novel about coming of age and violence, but also about friendship, love, and writing, which make life bearable and have the power to alleviate pain and deter us from inflicting it on others. At first, Evelin's entire world is a large family house with little space. There, her father's threats and aggressive outbursts eat into the walls. When the scene expands to classrooms and school hallways, Evelin is hit by taunts, which she tries to drown out with the emptiness in her stomach. While outwardly she develops from a brilliant girl into a headstrong teenager and an independent woman, holes are being carved inside her. The confidante – the narrator – uncovers them with feeling. From Evelin's memories, saved text messages, photographs, and diary entries, she writes out her story. Thus, from a dense, precise language, a narrative is created that, even on a formal level, often – just like Evelin – petrifies, hits, drifts away, shatters, and puts itself back together.

Kresnik Award for best novel of the year 2024

Nominated for Kritiško sito Award for best book of the year 2024

In lavishly diverse ways, Ana Schnabl speaks of the power of perseverance and forgiveness, offering us a stylistically bravura, charmingly dense, and subtly written invitation to reflect on an un-cathartic catharsis, on hope.

Kresnik Award justification
It combines psychological depth, aesthetic sophistication, and social acuteness. It is not an easy read; it demands our full attention and a willingness to follow even the most subtle signals. But this is precisely where its power lies – it is not a book that offers us quick answers, but one that pushes us into contemplation, into discomfort, and also into the quiet hope that we can overcome the boundaries that quietly constrain us.

Gašper Stražišar, DSLK
September is not just a bildungsroman about coming of age and violence, but also about the importance of friendship and love, small gestures and bigger decisions that keep us afloat even in moments when we ourselves might no longer have the strength to swim. "With love she sinks into a dream, with fear she awakens. Sinks, awakens, sinks, awakens."

Neža Kokol, AirBeletrina
In the novel September, Ana Schnabl tackles the difficult and unfortunately relevant, yet marginalized and often even denied issue of domestic violence and the consequences it leaves on victims and witnesses, mostly women and children. /.../ Ana Schnabl has brilliantly handled the issue of violence and trauma in the novel September from multiple perspectives, including therapeutic interviews, teenage slang, and digital messages. She masters linguistic nuances down to the last detail, even though she seems to violate spelling rules. Stuttering speech, unfinished, interrupted sentences are placed exactly where they need to be. With descriptions, dialogues, and internal monologues, she brings her protagonists closer to us in an almost complete physical and psychological form; the tensions before the outbursts of beatings are so vivid that they also intensify the reader's discomfort and distress.

Nada Breznik, Ars
With a touch of irony, I would say that September as a whole is truly a kick in the gut for the reader. We feel Evelin's distress as our own because of the dense, stifling writing style. The language, along with the narrator's inner experience, thickens, accumulates, floods, shatters, tears, whispers, questions, lashes out at itself and others, until it once again (at least temporarily) calms down in a trembling ball full of silence. And here the novel's main distinction is revealed: not the story itself, but the way it is presented, and thus the way it touches us. It is not a dry moralization about the destructiveness of violence or a glorification of a horrific life situation and the resulting trauma and self-destruction, but an emotionally rich story that offers us a reflection on the persistence of violence and the established patterns of power dynamics in the family and society, as well as on love and the (in)ability to transform. I can hardly say that the novel is a pleasant read, but precisely by burdening the reader and thickening chokingly in their throat, it achieves a powerful effect – the experience of how violence overwhelms an individual and with its strong current reshapes everything in its path.

Eva Ule, Literatura