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Dark Mother Earth

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Dark Mother Earth

By: Kristian Novak, Ellen Elias-Bursac - translator
Narrated by: Will Damron
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About this listen

An amnesiac writer’s life of lies and false memories reaches a breaking point in this stunning English-language debut from an award-winning Croatian author.

As a novelist, Matija makes things up for a living. Not yet thirty, he’s written two well-received books. It’s his third that is as big a failure as his private life. Unable to confine his fabrications to fiction, he’s been abandoned by his girlfriend over his lies. But all Matija has is invention. Especially when it comes to his childhood and the death of his father. Whatever happened to Matija as a young boy, he can’t remember. He feels frightened, angry, and responsible....

Now, after years of burying and reinventing his past, Matija must confront it. Longing for connection, he might even win back the love of his life. But discovering the profound fears he has suppressed has its risks. Finally seeing the real world he emerged from could upend it all over again.

©2013 Kristian Novak (P)2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Translation © 2019 by Ellen Elias-Bursac. European Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction World Literature
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I am Croatian, and have read this book in Croatian several times. It's a great, dark story, perfectly set in its environment, which draws you in and doesn't let go. When I saw it was being translated to English, I was a bit worried how that would work. Like I said, the plot and much of the atmosphere are rooted in the location of the story. Then I saw who the translator was, so I was a bit less worried, because if anyone could do it, it's Ellen Elias-Bursać. Now I listened to the book - in one day. It literally took me one day to do it. It's narrated by an amazing narrator, whom I've listened to before and admired (Bad Blood - great job!), and this performance is just as impressive. You can hear (well, *we* can hear; the general international audience won't really care) the work he's done to pronounce the local names as close to original as possible, and the amazing translation helped him with perfect translations of some of the things I thought were untranslatable. That's why Ellen Bursać is such an amazing translator. Anyway, this is a dark, heavy, wonderfully written thriller-horror story, and if you like those, don't miss it!

An amazing read (listen)

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