Translated from the Macedonian by Christina Kramer
ISBN: 978-1-912545-40-7
Grandma Non-Oui is a beautifully translated biographical novel that tells the life story of a woman from Split, Croatia. In her youth, Grandma Nedjeljka—or Non-Oui, as she goes by the nickname given to her by her French teacher (a literal French translation of the syllables of her nickname Ne-Da, Slavic for No-Yes)—falls in love with an Italian soldier, Carlo, at the end of the second World War and later moves to Sicily to marry him.
Written as an exchange between Grandma and Nedjeljka, her granddaughter and namesake, a conversation unfolds that encompasses a broad range of times and places between 1938 to 2016, moving back and forth temporally from past to present, and geographically between Castellammare del Golfo in Sicily and Split, Croatia. Their imagined conversations reveal the lives of these two different women and the deep cross-generational bond between them, as they discuss cross-cultural love, private life, and family, as well as the public sphere of war, politics, and migration.
“The nostalgic and emotional language of Grandma Non-Oui, elegantly rendered in the English translation by Christina E. Kramer, resonates deeply with the reader. Grandma Non-Oui is a beautifully written, deep and emotional novel; a must-read for picky readers who want to enjoy both an excellent plot and its artistic presentation.”
Reviewed by Petar Penda, Riveting Reviews
“For history, like human lives, defies narrative logic. One thing happens, and then the next. Things may go forward or backward, recur or rupture. And so Grandma Non-Oui’s story is history itself, where the personal and political are forever intertwined. Such are the stories we pass along.”
Eamon McGrath, Full Stop
