Gabriela Babnik’s third novel Dry Season (2012) won the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature. The novel is a record of an unusual love affair. Anna is a sixty-two-year-old designer from Central Europe and Ismael is a twenty-seven-year-old African who was brought up on the street where he was often the victim of abuse. What unites them is the loneliness of their bodies, a tragic childhood and the dry season or Harmattan, during which neither nature nor love is able to flourish. She soon realizes that the emptiness between them is not really instituted by their skin colour and age difference, but predominantly by her belonging to the Western culture in which she has lost or abandoned all the preordained roles of daughter, wife and mother. Sex does not outstrip the loneliness and repressed secrets from the past surface into a world she sees as much crueller and at the same time more innocent than her own. “Cleverly written as an alternating narrative of both sides in the relationship, the novel is interlaced with magical realism and accurately perceived fragments of African political reality.”