Trieste

Jan Morris (then James) first visited Trieste as a soldier at the end of the Second World War. Since then, the city has come to represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories. Here, her thoughts on a host of subjects - ships, cities, cats, sex, nationalism, Jewishness, civility and kindness - are inspired by the presence of Trieste, and recorded in or between the lines of this book. Evoking the whole of its modern history, from its explosive growth to wealth and fame under the Habsburgs, through the years of Fascist rule to the miserable years of the Cold War, when rivalries among the great powers prevented its creation as a free city under United Nations auspices, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is neither a history nor a travel book; like the place, it is one of a kind. Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Venice , Coronation Everest , Hong Kong , Spain , Manhattan '45, A Writer's World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy. Hav , her novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Jan Morris (then James) first visited Trieste as a soldier at the end of the Second World War. Since then, the city has come to represent her own life, with all its hopes, disillusionments, loves and memories. Here, her thoughts on a host of subjects - ships, cities, cats, sex, nationalism, Jewishness, civility and kindness - are inspired by the presence of Trieste, and recorded in or between the lines of this book. Evoking the whole of its modern history, from its explosive growth to wealth and fame under the Habsburgs, through the years of Fascist rule to the miserable years of the Cold War, when rivalries among the great powers prevented its creation as a free city under United Nations auspices, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere is neither a history nor a travel book; like the place, it is one of a kind. Jan Morris's collection of travel writing and reportage spans over five decades and includes such titles as Venice , Coronation Everest , Hong Kong , Spain , Manhattan '45, A Writer's World and the Pax Britannica Trilogy. Hav , her novel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

" Trieste is a monumental feat of the imagination. Impassioned and lucid, it is impossible to read it and not come away with a new understanding of the world. Daša Drndic has given us a masterpiece that is not only brilliant, but uncompromisingly humane. How lucky we are" MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King , shortlisted for the Booker Prize "Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece" A.N. Wilson, Financial Times "Trieste is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick" Craig Seligman, New York Times An old woman sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy. She is waiting to be reunited with her son. He was fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her sixty-two years before by the Nazi authorities during the German occupation. By focusing on the experiences of one individual, Drndic engages head-on with the traumatic history of WWII and the Holocaust and deals unsparingly with the massacre of Jews in Trieste's concentration camp. A literary collage comprising photographs, scraps of poetry, interviews and testimonies from the Nuremberg Trials, it is a formally daring work of immense power and scope. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac

" Trieste is a monumental feat of the imagination. Impassioned and lucid, it is impossible to read it and not come away with a new understanding of the world. Daša Drndic has given us a masterpiece that is not only brilliant, but uncompromisingly humane. How lucky we are" MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King , shortlisted for the Booker Prize "Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece" A.N. Wilson, Financial Times "Trieste is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick" Craig Seligman, New York Times An old woman sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy. She is waiting to be reunited with her son. He was fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her sixty-two years before by the Nazi authorities during the German occupation. By focusing on the experiences of one individual, Drndic engages head-on with the traumatic history of WWII and the Holocaust and deals unsparingly with the massacre of Jews in Trieste's concentration camp. A literary collage comprising photographs, scraps of poetry, interviews and testimonies from the Nuremberg Trials, it is a formally daring work of immense power and scope. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac