Through the nineteen stories of this award-winning collection (the “Edo Budisa Award” for best short story collection in the area that does not require translation into Croatian, 2016), we follow the heroine's emotional journey from unreliable memories of an early deceased mother, through childhood with an alcoholic father who was never there and grandparents gently disappearing and dying before her eyes, a crumbling country, a changing world, and the discovery of sexuality and the worries brought by existence.
The motive of the mother connects all of the stories, like the ubiquitous spiritus movens, and unobtrusively guides us through the emotional life of the heroine, introducing us to the pre-war, war and post-war Sarajevo, "paradise", mixed marriages, remote small town in Serbia as a place of refuge, and a hospitalization at a psychiatric hospital.
The collection of Lejla Kalamujić is an authentic testimony of the fate of her family, and her writing is an act of courage and confrontation with the darkest, hardest elements of every human.