Bedbugs [TRADE PAPER ]

Holed up in her Zagreb apartment, reeling from the sudden death of her husband— whom she had married only days earlier— Gorana sets to writing a letter uncovering everything that has happened in her life that has led her to penning this confession to her friend: from discovering bedbugs to workplace romance and familial fallouts. An architect by trade, not even her many professional successes have saved her from constantly feeling like a lonely outsider, even when it comes to her family on the coast.Gorana’ s attempt to find closure, and connection, is delivered in a delicately braided story that introduces English-language readers to Martina Vidaic’ s impressive eye for detail embodied in prose that stands apart from so much contemporary Croatian fiction in how the central trauma is not related to war, but the intrinsic, and often isolating, difficulties of the human condition."Elias-Bursać’s translation is linguistically lovely and stylistically luxurious . . . a gutsy character study of a smart woman who, midway through the journey of her life, must interrogate and process loss on multiple levels, none more destabilizing than the realization that she has perhaps entirely lost her way." —Cory Oldweiler,LA Review of Books

"Bedbugstraces the bites of bedbugs into the daily loneliness of lived experience in late capitalism." —Alina Stefanescu, Author ofMy Heresies

"Some novels tap into a steady momentum as different events play out. This one has a more unruly pace, taking its narrator through a series of bleak events that disrupt her comfortable life and, in some cases, turn out to have catastrophic consequences. The structure ofBedbugsmight seem intimidating at first, but its relentless approach pays off in the end." —Tobias Carroll,Words Without BolÓ-