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The 2013 Winners are In!



Daunt Books Children's Short Story Competition 2013

Eastern Europe - Romania, Slovakia and Lviv

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  Red Cavalry & Other Stories by Isaac Babel

  £10.99 Price: £9.89    Add to Basket

  Quite simply some of the finest war fiction ever written, Babel's Red Cavalry stories draw on his experiences as a journalist riding with the Cossacks in the 1920s. They retain to this day an astonishing freshness, and a depth of compassion and observation that only the very best can achieve. Recommended without hesitation.

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  The Romanian by Bruce Benderson

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  A quite extraordinary book - part memoir, part travelogue, part unrequited-love letter. In his quest to win over the impoverished Romanian for whom he has fallen Benderson embarks on a wild obsession with the nation and its culture, laying bare the darkest sides of both the country and himself.

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  Youth Without Youth by Mircea Eliade

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  A fantastic psychological thriller by enigmatic Romanian philosopher Eliade, this novel tells of Matei, an elderly academic pursued by the Nazis for his prodigious powers of memory and comprehension. Suspenseful, witty and poignant.

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  Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

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  Based on the author's own quest to locate his Ukrainian ancestors, this is a stupendously inventive novel, hilarious and moving and utterly unique. Highly recommended.

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  The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek

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  A Czech 'Catch 22', Hasek's brilliant satire tells the epic story of the likeably idiotic Svejk and his bumbling attempts to serve in The Great War. Not to be missed.

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  I Served The King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

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  A glitteringly comic novel charting the rise and fall of its remarkable hero Ditie, a daydreaming hotel waiter who comes into great fortune only to lose it. Deceptively whimsical, Hrabal here deftly skewers the 20th Century trials of his country.

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  The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

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  'It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about the angels'. Whimsy, humour, eroticism, satire, linguistic play, philosophy: all that one expects from a Kundera novel is here in this, one of our favourites.

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  Death & The Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

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  A wonderful black comedy that never strays far from our Favourites table. Obituarist Viktor is drawn into a shady post-Soviet criminal underworld with only his pet penguin Mischa for company. Surreal and brilliant.

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  The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning

  £17.99 Price: £16.19    Add to Basket

  Comprising 'The Great Fortune', 'The Spoilt City' and 'Friends and Heroes', Manning's brilliant trilogy actually has little to do with what we today call The Balkans. Instead it tells of Guy and Harriet Pringle, a couple living in Romania whose world is turned upside down by the advance of German forces. Autobiographical and vividly imagined, this is a fine comedy of manners set against traumatic world events.

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  Zoli by Colum McCann

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  The intoxicating tale of Zoli, a Slovakian Gypsy woman whose life is based on the true story of the Gypsy poet Papusza. Like his recent highly acclaimed novel Let the Great World Spin, McCann uses a number of different, genuinely-crafted voices to tell this charming story.

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  The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller

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  The most popular of Nobel Prize-winner Herta Muller's novels, this is the story of a group of students growing up in Ceausescu's Romania. Having lived there herself, Muller convincingly recreates the fear and despair of those living in a communist police state.

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  Memoirs of an Anti-Semite by Gregor von Rezzori

  £8.99 Price: £8.09    Add to Basket

  First published in 1979, this is a controversial and lyrical account of one man's struggle to come to terms with the terrible realities of his era.