LBF18 Baltic States ‘Market Focus’ – 12 books to look out for in 2018

9th April 2018

The London Book Fair, which runs from 10th to 12th April, this year has its ‘Market Focus’ on the Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. They are now independent members of the EU, but were formerly part of the Soviet Union. They have had a troubled past. That past, and the new present, has been fertile ground for a collection of great authors. We list below 12 books that are being published in English for the first time this year. The reader is in for a treat – fiction, memoirs, and poetry.

Estonia

1. The Death of the Perfect Sentence by Rein Raud

A political thriller set mainly in Estonia during the dying days of the Soviet Union, but also in Russia, Finland and Sweden. This sometimes wistful examination of how the Estonian Republic was reborn after a long hiatus speaks also of the courage and complex chemistry of those who pushed against a regime whose then weakness could not have been known to them.

2. The Ropewalker: Between Three Plagues by Jaan Kross

Jaan Kross’s trilogy dramatises the life of the renowned Livonian Chronicler Balthasar Russow, whose greatest work described the effects of the Livonian War on the peasantry of what is now Estonia. Like Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, Russow is a diamond in the rough, a thoroughly modern man in an Early Modern world, rising from humble origins to greatness through wit and learning alone.

3. Hanuman’s Journey to Lolland by Andrei Ivanov

Hanuman’s Journey to Lolland was Ivanov’s first novel, and it immediately propelled him to the stratosphere of contemporary Russian fiction. The book is partly fictional and partly autobiographical, being based on the writer’s experiences of life in a Danish refugee camp, where he spent a year or so just before and after the turn of the millennium. Sharp-witted and involved dialogues, an idiosyncratic sense of humour, and a recurrent metaphysical dimension add colour to the story.

4. Days of Grace by Doris Kareva

Kareva is the most adored and beloved author in Estonia. Days of Grace spans over forty years of her poetic output, showing how the sustained depth and clarity of her poetry lies in her ability to create ambiguity and suggest harmony at the same time, with a multiplicity of meanings generating the opposite of clarity: a form of hinting which at its most illuminating becomes utterly oracle-like.

Latvia

5. Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena

A literary bestseller that took the Baltics by storm, it has been published in 10 languages already and will be published for the first time in English this year. This novel considers the effects of Soviet rule on a single individual. The central character in the story tries to follow her calling as a doctor. But then the state steps in. She is deprived first of her professional future, then of her identity and finally of her relationship with her daughter. Banished to a village in the Latvian countryside, her sense of isolation increases. Will she and her daughter be able to return to Riga when political change begins to stir?

6. The Green Crow by Kristīne Ulberga

Institutionalized in an asylum, a woman with a record of hallucinations commits her life story to paper. She records, from the age of six, her earliest memories of a drunken and abusive father, the strange men her mother introduced to repair the family, the imaginary forest to which she would run to safety, and, of course, the enormous talking green crow who appeared when she most needed him. Ulberga’s The Green Crow is a fable about womanhood, individual freedom and the strait-jacket of traditional gender roles.

7. Doom 94 by Jānis Joņevs

Jonevs’ debut, this quickly became a bestseller in Latvia and has already been translated into six languages, with a further three due soon. Doom 94 is a portrait of a generation in the 1990s who are searching for their own identity and are fans of alternative culture. This is a touching story about us as youngsters, when everybody is against the whole world and tries not to become ‘one of them’. But is it for real? Can one keep the promise?

8. Nakedness by Zigmunds Skujiņš

One of the most translated Latvian writers, Skujiņš received the Cabinet of Ministers’ Award for Lifetime Contribution to Latvian Literature (2007). His work has been translated across Europe and several of his books have been made into films and his latest, Nakedness, is publishing with Vagabond Voices this year.

Lithuania

9. Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

In 1941, 14-year-old Dalia and her family are deported from their native Lithuania to a labour camp in Siberia. As the strongest member of her family she submits to twelve hours a day of manual labour. At the age of 21, she escapes the gulag and returns to Lithuania. She writes her memories on scraps of paper and buries them in the garden, fearing they might be discovered by the KGB. They are not found until 1991, four years after her death. This is the story Dalia buried. The immediacy of her writing bears witness not only to the suffering she endured but also the hope that sustained her. It is a Lithuanian tale that, like its author, beats the odds to survive.

10. The Fox on the Swing by Evelina Daciūtė (author), Aušra Kiudulaitė (illustrator),

This hope-filled children’s book teaches young readers about family, happiness, and friendship. Complete with stunning illustrations, The Fox on the Swing was selected to the final of the Nami International Picture Book Illustration Contest and to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair Illustrators Exhibition.

11. White Shroud by Antanas Škėma

White Shroud is considered by many as the most important work of modernist fiction in Lithuanian. Drawing heavily on the author’s own refugee and immigrant experience, this psychological, stream-of-consciousness work tells the story of an émigré poet working as an elevator operator in a large New York hotel during the mid-1950s. Written from the perspective of a newcomer to an Anglophone country, White Shroud encourages readers to better understand the complexities of immigrant life.

12. Darkness and Company by Sigitas Parulskis

Sigitas Parulskis is one of Lithuania’s most fêted and influential contemporary writers and recipient of the Person of Tolerance Award.
Darkness and Company is ground-breaking: it tells the gripping story of a young Lithuanian man drawn into the events of the Holocaust in Lithuania and is the first major novel by an ethnic Lithuanian to examine the Holocaust in that country.

Enjoy your reading!

Tony for the TripFiction team

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