By Ivica Prtenjača. Translated from Croatian by David Williams
ISBN: 978-1-912545-364
A mother, a father and a son face illness and the new restrictions of a declared pandemic in the context of their native Croatia. The dream of returning as a family to the sun-soaked terrace of their home in Dalmatia is what inspires them to face – and conquer all. Ivica Prtenjača is a quiet novelist at ease in his craft, restrained in his narrative voice, while confident that his characters and their meandering fates will do their work on the reader. Let’s Go Home, Son has got everything it needs. Family values, loss, guilt, shame, love, disappointment and cautious hope.
Winner of the V.B.Z. unpublished manuscript award 2021
“Let’s Go Home, Son is a compelling short novel, a novel of truths already learned but unrealized, and David Williams’s translation of it is a marvel. The characters are sketched rather than painted, and the prose is pithy rather than beautiful, but the overall effect is powerful. In fact, like life itself, the novel doesn’t really end, in any conventional sense.”
Michael Tate, LA Review of Books
