Name: Knjiga drugih
Price: 27 EUR
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ISBN: 9789612843724

The Book of Others

Knjiga drugih

Jela Krečič

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Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2018
Number of pages:: 330
Rights available:: world
Available reading materials:: English sample translation

Following her hugely popular debut, None Like Her, Jela Krečič returns with The Book of Others: a novel dedicated to the books that nobody reads. At the centre of it is just such a book; nobody knows what it is about or who wrote it, yet it affects the lives of numerous characters.
The fates of the novel’s individual protagonists, residents of Ljubljana from various generations and backgrounds, intertwine around a mysterious book that they pass on to each other, with the narrative following the character who has the book at any given moment. In the budding love story of Tine, a student, and Ana, an actress, the book plays an important role as a physical object of connection. In another story, dedicated to Heda, a young lecturer at the university, the book is the reason Heda meets an older woman, Veronika, and their accidental meeting grows into a very real friendship. At the same time, Heda begins corresponding with an acquaintance, Ariel, and their letters soon become intimate and more gradually, erotic. The book also marks the lives of the Kaprič family where the father’s redundancy almost leads to a breakdown of family ties. The novel, written with humour, ends with the book eventually returning to its rightful owner – only to reveal that he does not recognise it either.

Longlisted for the Kresnik Award for best novel of the year 2019

After her first novel, Jela Krečič has taken a step forward in the pyschological mapping of the characters. If she confined herself to superficial analysis in her first work, her second delves more intensively into the depths of the individual and their relationships with others.

Radio ARS
The Book of Others brings us interesting stories of people of various generations and profiles, from teenagers to retirees, all of which are – in addition to the mysterious book that nobody has read but they keep passing on to each other – connected by the town they live in, Ljubljana, that Jela Krečič has cleverly woven into the novel.

Svet 24
The Book of Others is a more ambitious project as I try to unfold an entire palette of destinies in an urban community, from a sweaty student ‘falling in love’ with a mature woman who had given up on love, to the unconventional friendship between a younger woman and an older one, to a family trying to deal with parents who have lost their jobs.

Jela Krečič in an interview for Delo
We could say that my characters are victims of my own ‘homebody’ existence, more or less limited to a single corner of the world, and this is why I make an effort to make their destinies as exciting, or at least as entertaining, as possible.

Jela Krečič in an interview for Bukla

Also by Jela Krečič

None Like Her

Ni druge

Jela Krečič

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