Girls Be Good
Bojan Babić, trans. Nataša Miljković (Glagoslav)
Grim reading ahead. These 20 connected stories all detail the journey of 20 toy lemurs, built in a factory in Yugoslavia just before the country fell apart. On their journey around the world, they are witness to all manner of horror, almost exclusively of young girls between four and 15 being abused by (often male) authority figures. The book speaks to a specific Serbian mentality that we have inculcated in ourselves since the 90s – a mentality of sheer fatalism, nihilism and hopelessness. Through that comes a bitter croak of light, the tiniest sliver of bleak humour, the smallest of steps upward. This is painful to read at times, but all the better for it. Terribly bleak and brutally honest about the pain of modern lives in post-socialist Eastern Europe and further afield across the Mediterranean. FT
Price: £17.50 Info: www.glagoslav.com