A small family moves to the Slovenian countryside to restore a large, dilapidated farmhouse. Then the relatives arrive—Cousin Vladimir, a former partisan writing his memoirs, Uncle Vinko, an accountant who would like to raise the largest head of cabbage on record, Aunt Mara, and her illegitimate daughter Elisabeth, bent on losing her virginity. And finally Uncle Schweik, the accidental hero who everyone assumed was dead. Flisar handles the absurd events that follow like no other writer, making the smallest incidents rich in meaning.

Lost in the imaginary landscapes of novels and films, 22-year-old Simon Bebler learns that he is terminally ill and has at best a year to live. Now the young student wants to cram everything life has to offer into this radically reduced lifespan. Inclined to see himself in the roles of fictional heroes, he begins to live out all the stories he has read or seen on film and experience every mental and physical state a man can experience-good and bad, moral and immoral. He refuses to die feeling he has been robbed of life, so he decides to enact it with real dramatic suspense. But once the drama is set up, it quickly escapes his control and he is faced with the question of whether he can remain the hero of his adventures or sooner or later become their victim. He finds himself amidst unusual happenings in New York where he meets extraordinary people, among them Al Pacino, Woody Allen, Uma Thurman... Are they real or simply doppelgängers? The narrative merry-go-round of this philosophical thriller poses questions faster than Flisar's characters can handle, let alone answer...

An electrifying exploration into the disturbed psyche of a young Roma man living in 1960s Yugoslavia.

An exploration of memory and life.

Evald Flisar's latest novel: smart, quick-witted, and inimitably tragic-comic.

My Father's Dreams is a controversial and shocking novel by Slovenia's bestselling author Evald Flisar, and is regarded by many critics as his best. The book tells the story of fourteen-year-old Adam, the only son of a village doctor and his quiet wife, living in apparent rural harmony. But this is a topsy-turvy world of illusions and hopes, in which the author plays with the function of dreaming and story-telling to present the reader with an eccentric 'bildungsroman' in reverse. Spiced with unusual and original overtones of the grotesque, the history of an insidious deception is revealed, in which the unsuspecting son and his mother will be the apparent victims; and yet who can tell whether the gruesome end is reality or just another dream - This is a novel that can be read as an off-beat crime story, a psychological horror tale, a dream-like morality fable, or as a dark and ironic account of one man's belief that his personality and his actions are two different things. It can also be read as a story about a boy who has been robbed of his childhood in the cruelest way. It is a book which has the force of myth: revealing the fundamentals without drawing any particular attention to them; an investigation into good and evil, and our inclination to be drawn to the latter.

In 1969 a young Slovenian painter Vili Vaupotic arrives in London with the great hope that within two years his masterpieces will be exhibited in the Tate gallery, while he himself will be invited to the annual Queen's tea party for successful immigrants. (Sir William Wowpotitch?) Tea with the Queen is a bitter-sweet tale of lost illusions, rich with unexpected reversals and (self)reflections. The external narrative is merely a means whereby the author creates in front of the reader's eyes 'a stream of those aspects of reality that most people, because of their trivia-laden minds, no longer register'. The novel's admirable flow is interspersed with 'a cacophony of aggressive sounds' forcing their way into the minds of the characters from outside, revealing that 'the outside reality is kinder than the reality of our souls'. Tea with the Queen is thus a luxurious, vibrant story about eternal human fallibility, about our blindspots and hopes, mistakes and sorrows; in other words, as universal as a story can be. Thanks to the author's exceptional feeling for nuances, dialog and dramatic fabulation even such a long novel is a pleasure to read. In terms of narrative mastery, Tea with the Queen surpasses even the authorl's legendary Sorcerer's Apprentice, in the past 30 years the most widely read novel by any Slovenian writer.

A novel from Evald Flisar.