Books published by Istros Books

Quiet Flows the Una is the story a man who has been stung by the horrors of war. Through his meditative prose, Sehic attempts to reconstruct the life of a man who is bipolar in nature; being both a veteran and a poet, who manages to re-build his life by reconnecting with nature and the memories of an idyllic childhood.

At the age of 86, Dov Hoenig decided to travel back in his mind to WWII Bucharest to tell the story of his 12-year-old self and so many Jewish families caught in the midst of struggle and terror.

The book contains eleven dramatic and often horrifying stories, each describing the life of a different prisoner in the camps and prisons of communist Albania. The prisoners adapt, endure, and generally survive, all in different ways. They may conform, rebel, construct alternative realities of the imagination, cultivate hope, cling to memories of lost love, or devisenincreasingly strange and surreal strategies of resistance. The characters inndifferent stories are linked to one another, and in their human relationships create a total picture of a secret and terrifying world. In the prisoners¿ back stories, the anecdotes they tell, and their political discussions, the book also reaches out beyond the walls and barbed wire to give the reader a panoramic picture of life in totalitarian Albania.

A woman searches for identity amidst the deviation of war and the dislocation of immigration. Drndic's characteristic irony and sense of the weight of history set the prose alight. A book for all times.

The Masterpiece is a love story with tinges of the political thriller, written in a tantalizing prose style. Set in the golden years of 1980s Yugoslavia,

A meditation of the cultural and religious significance of bread throughout history

Catherine is a powerful female voice seeking her place within her family, among friends, in the cities she lives in, and constructing her unique identity as a daughter, granddaughter, friend, mistress, wife and a mother.

A Swarm of Dust is one of Flisar's finest works of fiction, questioning the very notion of objective truth and subverting the norms of Judeo-Christian morality

From one of Slovakia's most respected authors, this tender and sensitive look at an elderly couple dealing with illness might remind readers of Michael Haneke's award-winning film, Amour.

Wild Woman is an anti-love story, set against a background of economic hardship. Told through the undiluted language of thought and mania, the twists and turns of internal dialogue are brought alive by a narrator determined to find her true voice.To go wild in order to be free.

Doppelganger consists of two stories that skillfully revisit the question of "doubles" and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society.

A bohemian novel set in 1970s Yugoslavia which follows the loves and losses of a disfunctional family in Belgrade.

With this collection of brutal and heart-wrenching stories, the Bosnian writer Faruk Sehic secured his reputation as one of the greatest writers to emerge from the region. A war veteran and a poet, Sehic combines beauty and horror to seduce and surprise the reader.

A historical novel which looks at Central Europe in the 16th century - a territory plagued by ceaseless battles for supremacy between the Protestant political elite and the ruling Catholic Habsburg Monarchy. I

'Hair Everywhere' is the touchng story of one family and how they cope with curing the incurable disease: cancer.

In the tradition of Bulgakov, Gogol and Kafka Ales Steger lets the forces of good and evil collide in this grandiose literary thriller. This is a debut novel filled with striking personae, haunting images and a grotesque plot. It proves, in the end, to be a journey into the heart of a European darkness.

Set during Byron's famous journey across the Balkans in the aurum of 1809, this is a fictional reimagining of a love affair between the famous poet and a local beauty

A collection of short stories which focus very much on the position of women in society, and in particular in modern Turkish society.