It is autumn 1918. The war is supposed to be over (the truce between Germany and the Entente was signed on 11 November), but it is not. On 18 November 1918, Riga and Courland are under the Germans. Amongst all this chaos, destruction, hopelessness and mortal danger, a small group of Latvians got together in the middle of an occupied city and founded their own national state, something which would have seemed impossible even a year earlier. “Every year, on the 18th of November, we fly the Latvian flag, solemn official events take place and people celebrate with their families and friends – perhaps less solemnly but certainly with more true feeling. It’s not surprising that nowadays the date 18 November, 1918 seems to have been a great celebration of the birth of the Latvian nation. And it hardly occurs to anyone that at that time there were hardly very many celebrants. (..) The diary form became a natural medium in the novel: one writer is an eyewitness of the events of 1917–1918, whereas the other is our contemporary. One of them can only guess not just at what the next day will bring but even at the events taking place around him, whereas the other encounters not knowing as he tries to understand the past and its relation to today’s reality.” (From the afterword by the author).

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv
 

18_by_P.Bankovskis.pdf

In the novel The Cool Mind (2018), the body of Helen – a transhumanist, computer scientist and military drone programmer – is found with her head severed. The investigation is quickly entangled in the issues of cutting-edge technology and the opportunities it can give to both ending and saving lives. Soon enough, the investigator faces a question the legal system is not equipped to satisfactorily answer: namely, is Helen really dead, and how does one determine that? Is immortality something to be sought, or avoided? The issues
of transhumanist technologies and bioethics and the ongoing investigation flows parallel to the story of Satu, Helen’s genderqueer lover, who struggles to cope with the death of Helen, as well as their own identity in a society where language itself allows little room for anything but a strictly binary gender expression.

Contact: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv

ACoolMind_by_I.Melgalve.pdf

A Man’s Heart meets the criteria of “historical novel”, however, like other novels by Lejiņš, it has multiple layers, making it more than just a formal portrayal of the period. In the novel, author Jānis Lejiņš turns to the history of 20th-century Latvia. At the centre of the tale is a modest and to some extent comic Švejklike character Ludis Šteinbergs, who shows up at a Latvian small town secondary school in spring 1939 to teach boys how to become real men and is naively overconfident in his own infallibility. Soon enough the unexpected occurs: into the perfect man’s carefully cultivated bachelor world, a femme fatale enters. Yet along the way the ominous mill of fate of the mid-20th century has already begun to turn, ready to annihilate anyone who may get caught between the millstones. Since the novel begins in 1949 with authorities erecting a monument to Šteinbergs as a hero who fell in  “the struggle against Fascism”, the reader must guess the answer to the question: who is this person really – an insignificant pawn in the great games of the 20th century, or someone whose essential nature is easy to overlook? The novel follows the life of Šteinbergs for several decades: he is the leading figure against a background of two major wars and the interwar period, which features other characters as well, starting with the General Secretary of the Soviet Union and ending with a meticulously crafted network of spies in several countries. A Man’s Heart offers the reader a psychologically realistic story rich in documentary fact in which there is witty humour as well, and the author, with a smile, often pokes fun at the stronger or weaker aspects of human nature.

Contacts:  Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv 

The common theme throughout the short-story collection All the Trees Have Gone is the life stories of people who used to be (or still are) children. They all need to decide how they should approach life. Do they do it alone, or alongside someone else? Which is more important, their calling and the quests it requires (either inspired or clouded by childish imagination), or actual social relationships?

The collection’s protagonists try to make sense of themselves and the world around them and try to find their place in it and master the rules of life. Yet the key to achieving this is always missing—a result of their childish selfishness. But they are also thwarted by and at the point when mental and physical existence meet, when love is shattered and lies out of reach. Childhood can be broken, but doesn’t end. No one noticeably grows up. Loneliness seeps into the foundation of relationships. Some characters get pushed to life’s sidelines by their defeats, and waste away like dried-out flowers. Others keep on trying to grow up.

The collection culminates in the last story, which describes the basic desire for something indefinably vast. And what is this vast thing? Becoming one with the Universe itself. For that to work, do you need another human being around? And does that person need to be someone whose existence causes deep emotions that open your eyes to the invisible world, and let you experience moments of epiphany? Or can you become one with the Universe on your own, once you’re all grown up?

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

AllTheTreesHaveGone_by_M.Pervenecka.pdf

In the novel Along the Azanda River, Aīda Niedra describes the experience of the Latvian National Awakening among peasants in the 1860s and 1870s. To emphasise the harmonious nature of the countryside and contrast it with the negative impact of the city on individual development, the author tells the story of many colourful characters as they go about their daily lives along the Azanda River in Niedra’s home region of Tirza. The central character is Maija, a young, happy-go-lucky woman who falls in love with a young man from a different region, leading to the disintegration of her planned marriage to a local man. However, the true core of this novel is its depiction of country life and the gradual awakening of Latvian peasants to a deeper inner world. The novel provides an incisive view into Latvian peasant life and the difficulties these people experienced through different historical periods, all set against
the backdrop of nature. The activists and intellectuals of the Latvian National Awakening are portrayed as noble examples, to be followed when developing one’s own national awareness and strengthening one’s patriotic feelings. With the publication of this book, Aīda Niedra pioneered a positivist direction in Latvian writing, which was characteristic of a large part of Latvian prose in the 1930s.

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

The main character, Ronalds Bergs, returns at long last to his native Riga. His life to date has been spent firstly as a professional basketball player and then as bodyguard to a Russian oligarch; he was shot in the line of duty and is still recovering from his injury. It’s high time for him to embark on a more peaceful life! In a department store, he runs into a former schoolmate. The two of them used to be inseparable and decide their chance encounter deserves a celebratory drink. Bergs learns that his old friend is now a professor and research scientist, working on an international, European project investigating old maps and researching ancient castle mounds and buildings.

Contacts: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv

BergsTheRelicsHunters_by_A.Jundze.pdf

Ilze Šķipsna’s first novel Beyond the Seventh Bridge generated more interest among Latvian refugees than her first collection of essays. Literary critic Jānis Rudzītis described this work as the first modern Latvian novel, and its publication as an important event in Latvian refugee community literature. It signalled the arrival of a new generation of authors, and a movement towards the incorporation of existential and surreal elements into Latvian literary works. At the centre of this novel lies an inner or psychological conflict, with a rich subtext 
of connections. There are few actual events in the novel and their role is insignificant: it is the author’s ruminations which are important, and these appear in the conversations of Edīte, Solvīta, and a few other characters. The chapters where Edīte’s opinion is most important begin with the letter E, while those where Solvīta’s opinion holds more sway begin with the letter S. Both characters speak in the first person and, ultimately, the reader comes to understand that they are the same. Edīte is introverted and finds it difficult to make real connections in life, whereas Solvīta – outwardly attractive and interested in life’s pleasures – has already married a rich American Southerner called Gerald Melvy. The plot of the novel grows primarily out of a string of various memories, moments of reflection, and emotions. The tension and dynamic of this work is generated by the constant back and forth between Edīte and Solvīta’s opposing perceptions of the world.

Contact: lelde@shaw.ca

The first volume of Bille was published in 1992, with Bille Lives On (Bille dzīvo tālāk) and Bille’s Wonderful Youth (Billes skaistā jaunība) published in 1996 and 1999 respectively. The entire trilogy was released in a single volume in 2004. Bille is the nickname of the novel’s main character, Sibilla Gūtmane, who observes an era filled with tragic events, and much of which was hard to understand, even for adults. Bille, unlike most other children portrayed in Latvian literature, is a city girl. The author avoids any nostalgia about the lost paradise of childhood and, using her actual memories, shows life in the workers’ district of Grīziņkalns and the life of the Gūtmanis family during the late 1930s and early 1940s. The result is 75 separate stories told in chronological order. Bille goes to school and visits her country relatives; as the regimes change, Bille grows up and, with the adults, she must endure periods of starvation, she helps people imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto, and she visits the countryside to exchange what things they do have for food. Each episode represents a moment stuck in her mind forever. Bille has been published in Swedish and Russian translation, while selections of her poetry have been published in translation in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.

Contacts: info@akka-laa.lv

Bille_by_V.Belsevica.pdf

Birds of Paradise is the sequel to the novel Five Fingers. Its tightly woven drama and precise poetic details clearly and uncompromisingly describe the 1960s – the only time and place in which ten-year-old Laura can grow, mature, and find the truth. The plot unfolds in the beginning of the 1960s when the main character, Laura, is ten years old and is forced to face all the realities of Soviet life – joining the pioneers, Communist political education, work on collective farm brigades. Laura’s thoughts are occupied not only by her readiness to fight for the Communist party’s ideals, but also by the beautiful vision of Pavlik Morozov and the secrets in the school’s attic. Her luck turns sour when she takes chewing gum to school for the first time, and also when she is forced to be on duty with Grigorijs, called the “Goliath Gorilla” in secret, the son of Communist Party organiser Smirnovs. As Laura begins to grow up, she comes into contact with good and bad, with the baggage she inherited from her parents and grandparents echoing their bitter experiences in Siberia nearly always somewhere in  the background.

“Māra Zālīte magnificently follows up on Five Fingers by perfectly conjuring up Kurzeme from the days when honest words had to be kept to yourself. Enchanting and gentle contact with the world is set in a dreamlike context as it blends with a growing perception of those whose futures had been trampled into the ground.” –Inga Ābele, author

“It’s doubtful whether Ionesco, Beckett, or Orwell could have done a better job showing the absurd drama in which we lived during that time.” – Virdžīnija Lejiņa, film director

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

BirdsOfParadise_by_M.Zalite.pdf

In this novel, Gundega Repše sheds light on events that until now had received only pointed silence. Therein lies the symbolic gesture of Bogene: to address the subject instantly, directly, and first-hand. Only then does the author let her readers regain their footing and gather up the threads of information.This is how we can come to understand the inner workings of silence. There’s no single answer – just like with speech, silence is both a strength and a weakness. The opposing side consist of the victim and salvation. One of the main purposes is to articulate and express feelings that have been repressed for so long – and to reveal the violence and suffering for what they were: visceral, corporeal, immediate and in shocking contrast to the clear vision and soaring spirit always looking to the future.

Lote is on a train headed east in the sweltering summer of 1941. She remembers the past, but forbids herself to think about it, much less talk about it. Lote spirals into silence, shifting the trajectory of her life from a future where she experiences new love, hopes and dreams, to the present, the now, inwardly – to life, existence, expressing herself only in the simple and basic phrases she needs to survive. The minimalism of living, keeping your mouth shut and helping others – this is the world according to Lote, a mute and broken existence, an unlikely victim. Repše has portrayed her protagonist with subdued compassion, refraining from exaggeration and drama, yet still articulating the long-silenced suffering by giving it greater meaning.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

Bogene_by_G.Repse.pdf

Bride Hunters was the novel which first
 brought Anšlavs Eglītis, the giant of Latvian literature, his considerable popularity. Its key qualities include exceptionally witty writing and excellent descriptions of its characters and settings. At the centre of the novel are the different paths taken by three friends – Eplats, Ķurzēns, and Dušeļs
– as they struggle to achieve happiness. Eglītis refers to these three fortune-seekers as “bride hunters” because they believe the quickest way to become rich is to marry well. The author gives a wry description of 
the Latvian elite of the 1930s – shop owners, consuls, bank employees, student fraternity members – and takes the reader through the restaurants and cafés that abounded in Rīga at that time. Bride Hunters is a living testament of Rīga, its people, their lives, mores, relationships, ways of thinking, language, approach to life, desires, and longings.

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv

Bride_Hunters_by_Anslavs_Eglitis.pdf

This crime thriller is set in modern Latvia, where people still think in two different languages. The Russian speakers nostalgic for Soviet times, when they ruled over the country for half-a-century. Meanwhile, those who had to fight to re-gain their independence, will never forget.

Tensions between the two sides are stirred up again, when a Latvian national party MP is murdered. The suspect is Russian: the son of a man who actively and openly denies Latvia’s independence.

The case is given to a detective who is forced to confront her own origins – the dreams and desires of both sides flow in her blood. The scandalous murder uproots the political scene in Latvia, uncovering truths that have been buried for decades. People of all ages and class are still looking for ways to co-exist with each other in a world that doesn’t have straightforward rules. The people of Latvia are embarking on a new future in the European Union, which promises to build the most humane society in the world. But shaped by a past as violent as Latvia’s, are they even capable of living up to this ideal? And what will it take for them to realise that we’re all the same?

BurialAtStateExpense_by_L.Gundars.pdf

In Celebrating Life, a peculiar woman named Eleonora has invited seven colorful characters to her own funeral. Eleonora is peacefully laid to rest, but in the evening following the funeral, these seven people, seven ghosts from the past, share their memories of Eleonora, with the stories serving as the book’s “celebration of life.” In sharing their memories, the storytellers wander about in space and time, embarking upon expeditions to distant metaphysical places. Reading the novel is, first and foremost, an aesthetic experience. Its tone is serious, nostalgic, strangely unreal, and beautifully wise.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

CelebratingLife_by_N.Ikstena.pdf

The significance in Latvian history of the years described in Zvirgzdiņš’ novel Dance on a Tightrope has not yet been fully understood. The narrative of the novel takes place in a Riga apartment in 1939, a short while before the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact by Germany and USSR, which divided the world as if the countries were toy building blocks. The protagonists in the novel are not heroes of their era but the most average of everyday people – each with their own story, fated to be lived through in the pages of the book under circumstances dictated by war. The protagonists are of various ethnic origins, besides Latvians there are also Germans, Russians, Jews and Poles in the narrative. Zvirgzdiņš shows how, with the change of regimes, people also change. Their lives become a true dance on a tightrope or finding oneself on the edge of a knife blade. Haralds, the ever helpful Mrs. Olga, Miss Stege the dentist, the efficient Amēlia or Amītis, the artist and free-thinker Kalnavārna, Eidis, who is able to adjust to any time-period, including wartime, the Jewish girl Ida, whom the author has provided with the opportunity in the novel’s epilogue to unite with Eidis and to return to a once-more-independent Latvia in the 1990s from their home of many years, New York. The author develops the plot of the novel unusually swiftly for Latvian literature. One scene quickly follows another; the many dialogues virtually allow the reader to take part in conversations. And, as is characteristic for Zvirgzdiņš – throughout so much that is tragic, from the many years of Soviet occupation, the arrival of the Nazis in Riga, the fleeing to exile from one’s homeland – the author’s characteristic humour permeates this work. In describing the novel, one can call it grotesque, farcical, or sentimental, but it doesn’t speak of what is most significant, which is that the unique style of Zvirgzdins is unlike any other in European literature.

Contacts: Kaspars Eizentāls, kaspars.eizentals@petergailis.lv

DanceOnATightRope_by_J.Zvirgzdins.pdf

Don’t Call Me, Don’t Look for Me begins with the murder of Natālija Nolle, the assistant of a member of the Latvian parliament. However, the plot soon branches off into several directions, encompassing a vast array of issues affecting every social class across many decades. This includes parliamentary corruption, links between business, politics, the Mafia and Russian intelligence services, and other criminal matters.

The novel explores the political situation in Rīga and Latvia immediately after the restoration of independence in 1990. It transpires that Natālija Nolle was actually a talented Soviet spy, and a portion of the novel is written from her perspective. When Natālija’s beloved son joins the protests to fight for a democratic Latvia, their interests clash as the popular struggle over the formation of the new state rages on. They each come into contact with the nouveau riche and the criminal underworld, learning about the close links between the two in the new Latvia.

At the end of the novel, the investigator discovers that Natālija was murdered by the same member of parliament for whom she was working, but it is impossible to prove his guilt due to his high status. A repeat offender nicknamed Psychopath is blamed instead, and the investigator sees the parliament member’s name among candidates for the Latvian presidency.

Contact: Aīda Kolberga, madara.junga@gmail.com

Dukts is the only book-length publication of Aivars Ozoliņš. It is an exemplary work of postmodernism, in which influences as wide ranging as Kharms, Kafka, Barthelme and Latvian nonsense poet Ņurbulis intermingle to create a unique blend of literature about nothing. Perhaps fittingly, after Dukts was published, which was soon followed by the short story Pasaka Nr. 13 [Fairy Tale No. 13], the author has not published any other work since, and has abstained from talking publicly about his writing. However, Dukts is one of the very few books with staying power from that heady era in Latvian literature when authors immersed themselves in all that had been previously forbidden or unwelcome. In 2014 the book was republished, and it is being enthusiastically discussed yet again at universities and dorm rooms all over Latvia. The book offers a kaleidoscopic mixture of characters, ideas and wordplay, mostly centred on the concept of “Dukts” – a word with no real meaning in Latvian. As the narrator explains in the book: “The essence of Dukts (although as of yet we’re not sure what it actually is) can be best portrayed by a single infinitely long, over-exposed film, which has to be seen instantaneously to be understood.” The book then details all the futile historical attempts to define or comprehend Dukts before showing the concept in practice with a brilliant series of surreal short stories.

Contacts: izdevnieciba@jumava.lv www.jumava.lv

Dukts_by_A.Ozolins.pdf

This is a story about a naive young man who dreams of a romantic future and an open door to endless possibilities. Instead,
 he ends up in Afghanistan in the hellscape of war, where he is forced to do almost anything to salvage any semblance of a future. In this future, however, it will be easier to kill than to love. A Lutheran minister and Gulag survivor serves only God, because the villagers often avoid even saying hello to him. A talented researcher at the turn of the millennium dreams about a career in science, but in order to support his family, he ends up selling tractors. A once famous journalist, now an addict, is excited about getting the scoop of his career without realizing that he is being played by the secret service. There are echoes from witch trials, death and love in Paris, a walk into the realm of silence, and fragments of overheard phone conversations, secretly copied letters and text messages that the reader must put together like pieces of a puzzle. Dust in the Hourglass was shortlisted for the 2014 Annual Latvian Literature Award.

Contacts: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv

DustInTheHourglass_by_A.Jundze.pdf

Early Rust – Elīna Zālīte’s only novel – depicts life in 1930s Latvia. Elza Ķikule, a poor country girl, arrives in Rīga in search of work, but has no luck. She receives an unexpected marriage proposal from a rich businessman, the old factory owner Ķikulis. This marriage of convenience runs into difficulties, not least when Elza falls in love with her husband’s son Italo, though this never develops beyond an affair. Elza’s search for happiness comes to an end when she is accused of her husband’s murder. The novel is written as Elza’s life story and as a lesson to her daughter. Zālīte portrays her main character unflinchingly as an empty
and shallow woman, which was rather uncharacteristic of novels at that time. All of the events that befall Elza illustrate her philosophy of life, which involves a simple motto: find money, because it makes life easier. Money
is the only reason to study, because without study the only way a woman can advance herself is through marriage. Elza also thinks that there is no reason to deny one’s body the pleasure it can receive from another body. At the end of the novel, however, the author punishes her main character for living according to these principles.

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

Farewell to Atlantis was the winner of the 2010 Annual Latvian Literature Award.

In her memoir, film scholar Valentīna Freimane (together with Gunta Strautmane) talks
about pre-war Paris and Berlin, about legendary film stars she has seen close up, and about regular trips as a teenager from Riga to Berlin and back. Going back to her childhood and early youth memories, the author describes the various environments in which she grew up: the high-finance bourgeoisie and artists’ milieu of Paris and Berlin, and particularly their film world with personalities well known from the history of cinema; the Riga Jewish, Baltic German and Belarusian circles and their lifestyles, as well as schools in Berlin and Riga. It is then she depicts the collapse, destruction and annihilation of all of this during the years 1940–1945, along with the particular culture that was characteristic of people in this part of the world. She has endeavored to provide her outlook as a child and a teenager without projecting an analysis of events that comes in the latter stages of one’s life, and to memorialize those people who, endangering their own lives, helped her and gave her shelter during the Holocaust in German-occupied Latvia. Her memoir encompasses an unusual variety of national, social, geographical and cultural milieus in the 1920s and 1930s up to 1945, which marks the end of the war and the beginning of the long-term Soviet occupation of Latvia.

Contacts: Stefan Diezman, s.diezmann@wallstein-verlag.de
www.wallstein-verlag.de

The novel is set in present-day Latvia.
There are two separate story lines that are nonetheless linked conceptually and metaphorically. The two stories converge in the final pages of the book, when its two protagonists cross paths. The “Writer’s story” is centered on literary historian named (coincidentally) Guntis Berelis, who is the embodiment of both a pedantically analytical mind and narrow-mindedness. Berelis the historian has made the “discovery of the century”: a hitherto unknown and brilliant poet, Eduards Bīskaps, who wrote in the 1930s and managed to publish a single small volume. Bīskaps, in contrast to the boring and conservative Berelis, is the embodiment of creative passion. The rest of the story involves the relationship between Berelis and Bīskaps. Finally, after one of their conflicts, Bīskaps turns out to have vanished along with his brilliant poetry.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

FieryOxenWithGoldenHorns_by_G.Berelis.pdf

Five Fingers was the winner of the 2013 Annual Latvian Literature Award. It is a fictionalized childhood memoir in which the author describes her family’s return from Siberia to Latvia in the 1950s, and her life in Latvia in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

“In her career, Zālīte has been best known as a poet and playwright... Poetry and drama are also present in Five Fingers; the best writing in the book has a combination of precise, poetic detail and dramatic purpose, carrying us to the end of the novel where the protagonist, Laura, promises to fulfil her grandfather’s dying wish – to give his wedding ring to his son, Reinis, ‘upon his return’ from Siberia, where he disappeared without a trace after being deported. This means that Laura has taken on the task of remembering.

...The ‘five fingers’ are a metaphor for the branches of the apple tree in which Laura sets up her perch, and a metaphor for God’s hand. They are also the fingers of Jewish opera singer Asia, broken during an interrogation by the Cheka. ...The repressive instrument, the ubiquitous Cheka, has been generalized as an absolute evil in the mythological character of the Ogre, at the same time without paying much heed to political correctness – that other enemy of freedom.”
– Egīls Zirnis, journalist

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

FiveFingers_by_M.Zalite.pdf

The narrative of the novel Flesh-Coloured Dominos is split into two parallel stories. On the one hand we have a story of 18th-century Baltic German gentry, within the framework of Tsarist Russia: Baroness Waltraut von Bruegen, with the help of the famous Count Cagliostro, is searching for her husband who has disappeared during the Turkish wars. With great difficulty she learns that her husband was torn in two during a battle, and that his lower half was stitched onto the upper half of the local captain Ulste, a man of humble origins. After finding the lower half of her husband, she conceives a child with it and is in the lengthy process of contemplating who should be considered the father of her child when her husband returns – in one piece. On the other hand, we have the life story of the author himself, travelling through the turmoil of 20th-century Latvia. The story is a rich tapestry of detail, with nationalities intertwined in an inseparable mix
– Latvians, Germans, Jews, and Japanese, among many others. The connection between the two narratives gradually becomes clear: they click together through details mentioned as if in passing. The novel is also a moving story of the experience of one person’s life during turbulent times.

Contact: Jānis Oga, janis@apgadsmansards.lv

FleshColouredDominos_by_Z.Skujins.pdf

Gaetano’s Krematos is a novel about a tired and shadowed soul’s journey
in the footsteps of lost gods. The main protagonist, Gaetano, interacts with divinely beautiful beings—wise superhumans who can create not only works of art, but
whole worlds. He idolizes them, but his interaction with them is fleeting, like sunlight briefly reflecting off water in cupped hands. Unsuccessful attempts to repeat this interaction cause Gaetano to lose trust in his own abilities, which mentally paralyzes him. The only thing keeping him alive burns out in the dark. His comatose existence is sustained by memories of light, which once again awaken his longing to become one with absolute beauty and magnificence. Gaetano’s journey ends with the creation of a culminating work of art—he finally breaks into a different state of consciousness and a different reality; a self-transformation into a higher plane: divinity.

The novel’s language and structure are microscopically subtle and macroscopically detailed at the same time. Though it is frequently poetic, it is essentially an impassively technical description of episodes observed in the present. A verbalized manifesto of the characters’ inner thoughts and emotions appears at the very end of the novel, taking the form of monologue poems. What appears as an objective description reveals the inner experiences and moods of the apparently indifferent characters. In this way, the novel becomes a biopsy of the soul and a projection of the consciousness.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

GaetanosKrematos_by_M.Pervenecka.pdf

The first part of Anna Brigadere’s autobiographical trilogy 'God. Nature. Work' is a psychologically nuanced portrayal of a servant girl named Annele and the way her character develops as she comes to understand the world around her. This story reflects the author’s own childhood memories, of when she first learned about the word of God, the natural world around her, and everyday work. Annele comes from a servant family. Each year on Jurģi (St. George’s Day) they move to a new home and therefore also into a new world. The people she encounters leave a considerable impression on Annele. As she comes to understand life’s truths and encounters injustice, so she begins to grow up. She learns about holiday traditions and the patterns – as well as, in her opinion, the oddities – of adult life.

Brigadere’s memories reveal a small child’s innocent view of life, which can, at times, bring both tears of joy and sadness to the eyes of the reader. For example, Annele is out on a visit and is given a slice of bread and honey – a food seen as a great treat. However, Annele doesn’t like the taste of it and leaves the bread by a fence. When she returns, she tells the lady of the house that a dog snatched the bread out of her hands. The lady comforts the little girl and, as a consolation, gives her a new slice of bread and honey.

Along with its realistic and gripping portrayals of country life at
the turn of the twentieth century, modern-day readers enjoy Brigadere’s expressive language in Dievs. Daba. Darbs, in which Annele describes everything she sees and hears simply, without pretension, and in a heartfelt way.

Contacts: info@latvianliterature.lv

God_Nature_Work_by_Anna_Brigadere.pdf

Gold was serialised in periodicals in 1914 and published as a novel in 1921. This book, like most of Upīts’ writing,
contains a notable analysis of contemporary social issues. Several artistic techniques, symbols and motifs characteristic of Upīts – also present
in his later works – appear throughout this novel. For example, the title embodies a symbol which becomes a leitmotif of the book. In this case, gold (or money) is a convenient literary device, used in a manner similar
to its appearance in the works of Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and other nineteenth-century authors, demonstrating that wealth can fundamentally test a person’s fundamental humanity. Augusts Sveilis Jr., the oldest son of a poor small- town tailor, is at the centre of the story in Gold. He and his family are tested suddenly and unexpectedly when Augusts, working as a servant, receives an inheritance from his mistress. The inheritance leads him (and his family) into a completely unfamiliar environment, one they had previously only seen from a distance. In this world, commercialism, intrigue, and the excesses of Rīga’s Latvian bourgeois inhabitants are everywhere. Here the slogan “Gold is life, gold is freedom, gold is everything” rules. Symbols of the era – shops or many types of goods, a car, and the bourgeois social circles of big-city Latvia – reveal the magical power of money, against which their country / small-town morals turn out to be powerless.

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv

Gold_by_A.Upits.pdf

The main character, Anna Zeltenīte, is a seamstress living on the outskirts of the city. The novel describes the tragic events in the final year of her life, as she falls hopelessly in love with an undeserving lad working at a factory. Anna is not dissimilar to Don Quixote in her role as a “good character” struggling against the evil world. The novel is filled with images of everyday material poverty, as well as the intellectual emptiness of the lives of the workers and other common folk with their cynicism and broken dreams – all of it commonplace in the world in which the author lived.

Is the novel’s sweet-sounding name meant to serve as a contrast to the harsh realities depicted within its pages? Or does it instead suggest the destiny of the less powerful? This novel is the story of Zeltenīte and people who lived lives like those of Deglavs’s contemporaries: individuals who were not powerful, but struggled to be on the same level as those “up top”.

As an observant publicist and emerging writer, Deglavs was troubled by what he saw when he moved from the countryside to Rīga. He depicts with unvarnished detail the vices he encounters – drinking, violence, general moral decay. His contemporaries acknowledged the author’s skill in writing honestly about his time without holding back and considered this to be Deglavs’s best work and one of the most lasting works of Latvian literature (A. Upīts, Ritums, 1922), while also highlighting the focused and dynamic language he employs in his prose (H. Lejiņš, Jaunā Gaita, 1969).

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

The Green Crow is a novel that explores the relationship between a human being and a bird, and is based on the assumption that such a bird, symbolizing profoundly experienced, true freedom, lives within us all. The green crow – a rare, conceited, boisterous creature – is that of the novel’s protagonist. She first meets the bird early in her childhood when the Green Crow emerges from her imaginary forest, a place to which the protagonist habitually runs to hide from the daily hurt and injustices she suffers, where she finds consolation in the tree house she has made herself. Searching for shelter and solace, she befriends the Green Crow. The main character’s family is very well-off and she wants for nothing. However, one day she finds herself in a psychiatric clinic following a spate of peculiar behavior, culminating in her telling her family about the Green Crow. The novel has two plotlines. One follows the protagonist’s adventures with the Green Crow, the other her search for some meaning to her life along the corridors of a mental institution, following her realization that family life has failed to confirm that life is beautiful and that anything more is needed.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

GreenCrow_by_K.Ulberga.pdf

The stories are independent of one another, but all have one thing in common: the titular character, a man named Gūtenmorgens. He appears to be a completely ordinary citizen, with a wife and children, with his TV, friends, and bottle of beer. He’s sometimes indecisive and passive. As such things often go, however, appearance and behavior can be deceiving. Gūtenmorgens is a hero at heart. Almost everything he thinks about or does is meant to make the world a better place, and to improve his own life. He doesn’t forget about others, either. Gūtenmorgens raises a monument to
his friend the writer. He reconciles a couple who divorced twenty years ago. He even handles developments in geopolitical events, along with the unity of the Baltic States. Gūtenmorgens is also never afraid to get his hands dirty. He shoots at opposing hockey players who beat his team, kills the entire Cabinet of Ministers at least three times a week, and scares other bad people, including his neighbor. Gūtenmorgens will never lay a hand on his neighbor’s dog, though; he loves animals.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

Gutenmorgens_by_M.Berzins.pdf

The novel Hearing the Mole-Cricket is a psychosocial portrait of the Dravnieks family across several generations, with a focus on Donāts, an old man with a vibrant and colourful personality. His memories, thoughts and dreams reveal the difficult lot of Latvian farmers as experienced by a single individual over the course of his long life. Through depictions of collective farm work and detailed, precise descriptions of even the most mundane tasks, Indrāne paints a vivid picture of the realities of life in Soviet-occupied Latvia as reflected by Donāts’ memories. All of this is expressed in the author’s characteristic emotionally-expressive style, combined with a rich layer of metaphor. At its core, the novel tells the story of the passing of the old generation of farmers (as personified by Donāts) and the arrival of a
new generation along with a new set of values.

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

The novel High Tide addresses the question of why we are so dependent on the past, even when it has turned us into someone else. In the beginning, they were two. They have no values, no horizontals or verticals, and have to create their own. They joke that if something bad happens, they’ll help each other end it all. And then something bad does happen. The boy gets sick, and the girl has to kill him. This “killing” turns out to be completely different from what you might see in movies or on stage. Everything turns out to be false, awkward, and horrible. Time goes on. One day, the middle-aged woman realizes she no longer knows whether what happened a long time ago really happened. Who were those two people who once lived together? Who was that girl who killed her boyfriend? Did he even exist if she only remembers him a couple times a year? She has nobody to talk to about it. So she writes, searching for an answer to the question: How many lives do we live in a single lifetime? By writing, she searches for the path to her former self. There is a high tide and a low tide: when you are in one, then you can understand the other. The plot of the novel is both real and imagined. The crime is also a symbol of the suicide we commit after each stage of our lives, in search of an answer to the question: What is it that continues to live?

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv
 

HighTide_by_I.Abele.pdf

Kuzmins’ first novel unfolds in Hokhmah, a small, quiet coastal resort town in western Latvia. Hokhmah’s seemingly calm day-to-day life, history, and mythology intertwine with the life stories of its residents, revealing their inner conflicts, complex relationships, and long-held secrets. Hokhmah’s stories are comical, tragic and at times surreal, though they are bound together by a conflict known to anyone who grew up in the countryside: a longing for one’s hometown and a simultaneous wish to break off any connections with it forever, regardless of whether or not that is actually possible.

Contact: Sven Kuzmins, sven.kuzmins@gmail.com

Hokhmah_by_S.Kuzmins.pdf

Anšlavs Eglītis wrote his novel Homo novus in the early 1940s, and the author hoped it would encourage the movement of Latvian painting onto a new path. In the novel, Eglītis shows the Rīga art world in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of a “homo novus”: the new arrival Juris Upenājs. The plot is moved along by coincidences, engaging events, the bohemian lifestyle, and the artistic creation process. The novel portrays the entire 
arc of the artist’s career, from a humble debut to the later accolades. The work also depicts the emergence and development of a new generation, encountering everyday difficulties. Eglītis does an excellent job in characterising the “gallery” of painters/artists in the story, skilfully detailing their outward appearance, their clothing, and their behaviour.

Latvian literature specialist Viktors Hausmanis has written that “in this novel you can read a perfect description of the bohemian life of Rīga artists, with all of their drinking, arguments, conversations, while also being taken on a walk through all of Rīga’s pubs and restaurants, wiling away several days planted next to a glass. Eglītis has been able to depict all of this with his characteristically attractive style, which is filled with life, vitality, and wit.”

Contact: ino@akka-laa.lv

Houses Without Doors is Ieva Melgalve’s sequel to her fantasy novel The Dead Don’t Forgive, but it can be read without having read the first. It is enough to know that the story is set in the same world, where emotions are magic, and this magic can either save you or kill you. In the Bruoni city of Graa, many young commonfolk women and even a young magician have been mysteriously killed. Who is to blame? Rem, the wizard from the capital city, or the stranger Vega who has arrived in Graa in an attempt to keep to herself? The head wizards do not care for justice – it is enough if their suspect survives. Thus, Vega and Rem will have to fight a silent and cruel mental battle while secluded in prison, at every moment risking the worst fate the mages can be forced to confront – loneliness. Will Vega be able to maintain common sense as the events of her recent past – a friendship that ended in murder, a spell that ended in humiliation, and a love that ended in separation – come rushing back to her?

Contact: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv 

Psychologically nuanced and dense with detail, the stories in her debut collection Ice Orange are mostly about women whose lives were shaped by the 20th century, a time when people learned to understand each other more from what was unsaid, when each step seemed to be both more difficult and more meaningful than it is now. These sketches of lives, from childhood through adulthood – both the minor as well as significant dramas – are full of familiar emotions, nostalgic details, and unspoken secrets. The stories in this short collection offer quick reads that will nonetheless leave a tangible impression, allowing insight into life through the prism of Vīgante’s marvelous and delicate prose.

Contact: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv

IceOrange_by_D.Vigante.pdf

Winner of the 2017 European Union Prize for Literature and a nominee
for the 2014 Annual Latvian Literature Award, this novel is a about the birth of the national consciousness of the Latvian nation, one generation of the nation’s teachers, the courage to oppose the insanity of violence and the consequences of failing to prevail over personal fear. It is 1905 in Riga, a city rocked by workers’ riots, violence, and pogroms during the waning days of the Russian Empire, when the Tsar is gradually losing his grip over his vast domain. Revolution is in the air – brother pitted against brother, social unrest and turmoil force people to choose sides. Amid this upheaval, a former schoolteacher becomes involved in the revolution, but soon realizes that the impending war is bound to require more of him than he is willing to give.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

InTheShadowOfRoosterHill_by_O.Zebris.pdf

The novel Insomnia takes place in a block of flats in 1960s Soviet Latvia, revolving around the main character Eduards Dārziņš and a woman named Dina whom he spots running outside his building one night. She is visibly shaken so he invites her into his flat, where she promptly falls asleep and remains as such for some time. When she wakes up, they begin to talk and he finds out more about
her, leading him on a journey through her often difficult life, which only raises more questions for Dārziņš. The story then switches to the 13th century, at a time when the Teutonic Knights were vying for control of the Baltic. Soldiers and ordinary people who can be understood to be the beginnings of the Latvian nation are forced to decide on their fate: whether to fight for their freedom against the knights, or to assimilate with their aggressors. The novel continues to oscillate between these two parallel plots, weaving a tale of humanity in the face of almost impossible odds, about the desire to control one’s destiny amidst the most oppressive of regimes.

Contacts: izdevnieciba@jumava.lv www.jumava.lv

Insomnia_by_A.Bels.pdf

Jelgava ‘94 proved to be a real hit and bestseller in Latvia. The story takes place in the Latvian town of Jelgava and centers around the rather short-lived craze for heavy metal music in the 1990s. The reader is given a view into this world from the inside – the text is both an intimate diary of a youngster trying to find himself by joining a subculture, as well as a skillful, detailed, and almost documentary depiction of recent history, i.e. the beginnings of a Latvia that had just regained its independence. The story seems even more captivating to the generation that shares the same perception and experience of the world – Joņevs is the first among this generation who has managed to stir its memories by transforming these images and that period into a full-fledged work of literature.
The novel garnered acclaim from critics and readers alike, and received numerous awards: the Annual Latvian Literature Award for Best Debut; the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature; and the 2014 Kilogram of Culture Award presented by Latvian Television. It was also named among the 100 favorite Latvian books of all time on the television show Great Reading, and the Children’s Jury.

Contacts: Jānis Joņevs, janisjonevs@gmail.com

Jelgava 94_excerpt.pdf

The novel Magnus, the Danish Prince is an account of the Livonian War that took place in the second half of the XVI century. It was a complicated and tragic period in history and one that defined the fate of the Baltic region, North West Europe and Russia for the centuries to follow. The author has chosen an untraditionally free and innovative form of writing allowing him to combine the historical facts, taken from old chronicles – testimonials of German, Latvian and Russian historians, with the lives and destinies of his fictional characters. He succeeds in blending both light-hearted, amusing episodes and real drama with undisputed historical records. This untraditional revisiting of the first and last King of Livonia – Magnus – resonates directly with the most current issues of modern life, thus through his exploration of a remote past, R. Dobrovenskij has written a book of relevance today.

Contact: izdevnieciba@jumava.lv www.jumava.lv

Māra is a novel about a group of sixteen-year olds. It tells of their first encounter with pivotal choices and decisions. Māra, the protagonist, has been close friends with three classmates—Edgar, Paul, and Mārtiņš—since first grade. In high school, she is forced to deal with problems resulting from two new classmates, and with her friends’ betrayal. Then, the long-cherished friendship suddenly shatters. When even her own home isn’t safe anymore, when the old foundations have disappeared but she doesn’t yet have new ones underfoot, Māra ends up making a desperate move...

This is a story about courage—about Māra’s journey from self-awareness to her acceptance and manifestation of that awareness. In the four parts of the novel, Māra deals with what she believes are mistakes, inadequacies, and the fact that she doesn’t fit in—issues that are all so significant in adolescence. Sometimes these issues remain significant throughout someone’s life. That’s why this isn’t stereotypical “YA literature.” Rather, it’s literature that explores the process of growing up.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

Mara_by_O.Zebris.pdf

March of the Clowns in the Market of Horrors (2011) – which can be also read as a standalone work, this book is the sequel to the wonderful yet gripping historical detective novel Time in Reverse. Twenty years have passed, the Second World War is raging, and Latvia’s independence has been extinguished. The same heroes – grey-haired jeweler Mendels Davidsons
and his children, rifleman Ēriks Vāls and his beloved Hanna languishing in distant Germany, the refugee Alma and the skillful merchant Izraels Šermanis appear along with many others once more on a stage set by historical events. The Nazis rule Latvia, the Jews have been driven into the
ghetto, and everyone is desperate to stay alive. The heavy burden of the last years has pushed Latvia’s people to a breaking point, exposing and bringing their true qualities into clearer focus – qualities which in more peaceful times would have stayed hidden. A time of chaos and destruction
when jealousy, hatred, lust, and a thirst for glory go hand in hand with true sacrifice and love.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

The book describes a time before both the author and the novel’s narrator, Erika, were born; its historical foundation is rooted in the post-war life of the Latvian intelligentsia, in the tragic fate of the so-called “French Group” and their search for intellectual nobility. The story is told from the point of view of Erika, born to Kārlis and Magda during the exile of Kārlis’s wife Dagmāra. Just as the French Group’s members were exiled to Siberia, the novel’s heroine Dagmāra too suffers the horrors of deportation, as did Kārlis’s mother before her. Their lives are destroyed by the age in which they live – Kārlis stops painting because his work isn’t being recognized, and he undergoes treatment for alcoholism. Dagmāra dies early, her translations unpublished. Marked by Fire’s ringlike composition ends in 1987, when, rereading what she wrote thirteen years prior, Erika marvels at the self-righteous tone of her memories. Taking into account that these notes were written when she was eighteen, the narrator’s impatience with the vagueness of historical events is an understandable youthful ardour. At the end of the novel, Erika is working in the library of a seaside village, where she becomes certain that the passage of time is no excuse, and where better than in a world of valuable books, like an eternal flame – a place of remembrance that never burns out.

Contacts: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv 

MarkedByFire_by_G.Repse.pdf

The novel Master of Lies is a fast-paced tale in which a classic thriller and crime plot are used to create a more profound theme, that of a person’s path to self-awareness during a period of historic complexity, and the dilemma of balancing the desire for survival with a clear conscience. The engrossing story of love, crime and a search for the meaning of life unfolds against a vividly depicted background of recent Latvian history. Alise and Aleksandrs grow up in late Soviet period Riga – in the same period of history, but in different worlds. Alise is a child in the family of a well-to-do party functionary, while Aleksandrs, having arrived in the capital city from the country, ends up in a communal apartment and hanging out with street gangs. The grown-up Alise spends most of her time in her own world of dreams and feelings –  living in a bubble which gently sweeps her through the times of change, while Aleksandrs flees the USSR and becomes part of an international mafia dealing in gemstones. Alise and Aleksandrs don’t know each other, however, they are linked by a mysterious person who calls himself the Master of Lies and who holds in his hands the threads of the silent instrument of power so popular in the USSR: a web of secret agents, informers and denouncers. The paths of Aleksandrs and Alise gradually move closer until they cross, and in now independent Latvia they, of course, fall romantically for each other. However, there is an obstacle to their happiness, a betrayal that took place in the past: one that they would like to believe had been forced upon them by the prevailing situation, yet the question remains of just how far a ruling power can manipulate the conscience of person who on the inside remains free. 

Contacts: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv 

MasterOfLies_by_B.Zile.pdf

Materia Botanica was written as a sequel to the novel Warm Earth, picking up exactly where Warm Earth left off—just after its protagonist Daniel is in an accident. In Materia Botanica, Daniel wakes up in the hospital after the accident
and finds a letter from his ex-girlfriend, Kira, and their son. He decides to return to them. He leaves his family home once again, a decision with which the rest of his family—especially his current partner, Voo, and his sister, Nelly, to whom he is tied with strange and intimate strings—are not happy. Nevertheless, he goes back to Kira and their son, and their reunion renews their bonds. But their new idyllic life is interrupted, first by Kira’s pregnancy with their second child, and then by the arrival of Nelly, who is too dependent on Daniel. The strange intimacy between brother and sister flourishes once more, threatening to ruin his newly rebuilt family life. However, Daniel searches for a way out, often finding refuge in nature as he immerses himself in botany, but at times his immersion is too deep, as Daniel starts to think of himself as truly one with nature. He embodies the metaphor of a family tree, with its roots, branches, fruit, and seeds. Captivating are the unusual plants and their manifestation in the novel, both within Žolude’s language and in the mind of Daniel.

Materia Botanica manages to resolve the conflicts in Daniel’s family, who were the main focus in Warm Earth, and turns the spotlight on Daniel’s life in a continuation of his personal and intimate path of existential pursuit. But the narrative does give voice to the other characters, as they reflect on events in their diary entries, giving readers a close and intimate view into each of their minds.

Contacts: Pierre Astier, pierre@pierreastier.com
Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dienasgramata.lv

MateriaBotanica_by_I.Zolude.pdf

Whereas Blaumanis’s novellas are dramatic and focus on a number of ethical questions, his stories are relatively light-hearted. At times they recall a free-spirited, well-written traditional folklore, rich with humour and captivating plots, focusing
on popular country folk character types. These stories are sometimes dominated by the grotesque, for example, in this story the wealthy farmer Jānis goes off in search of a bride and pretends to be deaf to learn about his future wife.

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

In an enormous theatre on many stages there are theatre performances all happening at the same time. The actors don’t have their own identity outside of their stage lives, and no other objective than just to get the chance for a better part and try to not get on the playrights’ blacklists. Who are these playwrights, who is the audience, and do they really exist? No one knows (although a few of them – the inquisitive young Lapsa, for example – tries to find out). One of the book’s central roles – an Actor who doesn’t have his own name – desperately tries to take part in the scenarios presented to him, but each time he tries to play his role honestly, it becomes more and more bizarre, tearing down the border between performance and truth. Similarly, the Mime – one of the androids equipped with artificial intelligence who maintains order in the theatre world – tries to play the role of guardian for the actors. However, as the Mime gradually awakens to a consciousness that becomes his own, he can no longer react to what is happening in the theatre without emotion. Perhaps they could continue to play their parts if the planned performances weren’t shaken by a resistance movement trying to realise the Actor’s identity behind the scenes and possibly even do away with the theatre’s power altogether. Yet their road isn’t easy – the idealistic Malda, who’s expecting a child, can no longer separate true love from performed love, and the tricky Gurds, sensing imminent danger to the movement, tries to make a scapegoat out of the egotistical Vladi, who in turn has landed himself a good part, no longer wanting to resist the existing order…

Contacts: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv 

MoonTheater_by_I.Melgalve.pdf

Mother’s Milk was shortlisted for the 2015 Annual Latvian Literature Award. The novel deals with the post-war period and follows the destinies of three generations of women, with the narrative focused mostly on the 1970s and 1980s. The mother, whose own mother has raised her without her real father, is a talented gynecologist who cannot accept the narrow space allotted to the individual by communist ideology. During her residency in Leningrad, she successfully – and in secret – performs an artificial insemination procedure on a young Russian woman, but the woman loses the child in a confrontation with the woman’s brutal husband, who is a war veteran. The path to science is now blocked for the talented doctor and she is reassigned to workin a small country village. She takes along her daughter, who is now deprived of the loving care of her grandparents. The doctor suffers from clinical depression, placing the burden of everyday life on her young daughter’s shoulders. The daughter too has to live with the inborn hostility of the system and, through the prism of her emotions, the turbulent events of the 1980s: the dismissal of a free-thinking teacher, the Chernobyl disaster, the death of several Soviet leaders, and the ensuing reform movements. The doctor’s daughter grows up, going through unexpected twists and turns of betrayal. The novel is about abandonment – of a husband and father, of dreams and hopes, of work and point of views, of friends and loved ones. This path of suffering is made lighter by a motif of forgiveness: the daughter, who helps her mother survive, was not given milk from her mother’s breast as a child, as the mother fears that by drinking her milk, her daughter might inherit her suffering and despair. The novel ends with the fall of the Berlin Wall – a breath of fresh air and freedom that the mother never wanted to see.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

MothersMilk_by_N.Ikstena.pdf

The novel Nakedness turned Zigmunds Skujiņš into a literary celebrity across the Soviet Union and “radically changed the Latvian prose scene,” according to Latvian literary critic Guntis Berelis. Since then, two popular films have been made based on the book, and it’s still the Skujiņš novel that most people first come into contact with. The novel’s protagonist, Aleksandrs Draiska, comes to a small textile factory town looking for a girl he’s been exchanging letters with. Finding somebody else at her address, he sets off on a search across the town, where he discovers that almost everyone is pretending to be somebody else. This mask-wearing becomes the cause of death for the girl Draiska has been looking for, driving him deeper into despair. The final twist is saved for last, however, when we discover that it was not Draiska, but his army friend who came to the factory town after falling in love with the girl from the letters, deciding to masquerade as his friend in order to find her.

Contacts: Jānis Oga, janis@apgadsmansards.lv 

Nakedness_by_Z.Skujins.pdf

The minor military port Karosta is a closed army settlement situated in the northern part of Liepāja, a port town in Latvia. During the 1970s, some of its inhabitants would do Cossack dancing in the local Sailors’ Club, a venue created from the local church building, while others tried to save their uniforms from the damage of excrement in the military jail. Reminiscent of the famous Russian nesting doll, Karosta was a model in miniature of the larger empire; closed off as it was from the rest of the world by the Iron Curtain, an off-limits area that only a selected, pass-holding few could access. Here, the officers drank cognac and their wives wore French perfume. But beyond the fence, in Latvian Liepāja, life was completely different. Andra Manfelde’s novel takes an insider’s look into those territories closed off to civilians, where military classification meant physical danger for outsiders, as a retrospective parallel look at the stagnating USSR and the secrets of adultery. 

The Seven Lives of A Poet is more than just a melodramatic literary device. The life of Rainis, Latvia’s preeminent poet, dramatist, statesman and thinker evolved in such a way that on numerous occasions his literary and political work brought him to the brink of almost total collapse,
after which he was forced time and time again to start his life over. There was no need for him to wait for or invent complexities in his life – it was as if the plot for a story of epic proportions was laid out right before him. It was a case where fact was indeed stranger than fiction. The focus of the novel rests on the lives of people who had a profound influence on the 20th century, as the reader is taken up in a whirlwind of dramatic events that changed the course of history.

Contacts: izdevnieciba@jumava.lv 

RainisAndHisBrothers_by_R.Dobrovenskis.pdf

This novel focuses on the people of Latvia in the 1990s. Medieval kings longed to get their hands on the Philosopher’s stone, a substance extolled by alchemists for its promise of eternal youth, happiness, and wealth. In the 1990s, history repeated itself much more simply – without any secret teachings or veiled intimations. People started chasing blindly after red mercury; a product of the imagination of Soviet intelligence services, an implausible miracle potion capable of granting world domination to whoever had it in their possession. Yet these people were out-numbered by those who simply wished to get on with their lives, to be happy and to love. As the wheels of the epochs turned, dreams and illusions crumbled – it was no easy task holding onto both oneself and one’s self-esteem in the ensuing turmoil. Latvia suddenly broke free, but not everyone had the strength to find that freedom within, as each and every one of us strove for survival. The novel depicts a wide spectrum of society. There are those from an older generation who received, with independence, an unexpected opportunity to finally meet their relatives who had been driven into exile. There are Soviet secret service agents, and there are the defenders of independence. The last of the forest brothers comes out of his forest after fifty years spent in hiding as a result of his rejection of Soviet power. And there are also the very young who desire to be happy but are oblivious to how heavily their first steps into the free wild world are about to test them.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

RedMercury_by_A.Jundze.pdf

Reds, Rats and Rock’n’Roll examines in retrospect the era of socialism in Latvia. The action takes place between the years 1978-89, the most severely tarnished phase of Soviet splendor. Various colorful characters live their lives in the pages of this book: the thoroughly drunk poet Harry Mikelson, who, for the consolidation of his career, becomes a spokesperson for the Cheka; the old Cheka official who commits suicide for unknown reasons; the swimmer and potential champion Eva Kallas and her romance with the somber Israeli spy Joren, who doesn’t quite know whom he works for and what he gains from his spying; the ruffian Zmejs and his comrades; Jozef, who has decided to join the army; as well as an endless number of other individuals. Each character has a separate storyline, and at first glance it seems they do not have and could not have anything in common.

Contact: Pauls Bankovskis, telomera@gmail.com

RedsRatsAndRocknRoll_by_P.Bankovskis.pdf

As with many of the other novels by Vilis Lācis, Rocky Road was written as a work of literary realism and contains autobiographical elements: the self-made man, and fishing and labour motifs from the first half of the 20th century. The novel’s plot focuses on the lives of young people in 1930s Rīga. Roberts Līviņš, the ambitious and driven son of a labourer, gets his education and goes on to become an architect working at a wealthy construction company. Soon after his attainment of higher education, respectable employment and a “better” social echelon, he falls in love with
the director’s daughter Līvija and is forced to forsake his earlier life, his roots, and his family. Roberts’s wealthy bride does not wish to become the wife of someone from a lower class and demands that her husband break off contact with his family; however, in the end Roberts understands that high society
will never understand his origins or his best friend Ēriks, a gifted boxer who is travelling along his own “rocky road” with Roberts. Ēriks is another one of the physically strong characters created by Lācis.

Like other works by Lācis, Rocky Road was first published in
 a serialised form. When advertising this “new, interesting novel” prior to its publication, the magazine “Atpūta” wrote that in the novel “the author uses his cleverness and descriptive talents to portray the lives of the city’s youth, their mistakes and ambitions.”

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv

Rocky_Road_by_V.Lacis.pdf

“The protagonists of Santa Biblia are Tūrs, Levs and Nīma, who is also the narrator. The prototype for Nīma is clearly Mary, and the prototype for Levs is Joseph. They are on a mission to save the world: to find and destroy a microchip plant which produces microcircuits for controlling people and installing a certain kind of personality programme in them. In the course of the novel, the protagonists visit twelve stations, which may represent an analogy with the Catholic Stations of the Cross (albeit there are fourteen of those, each dedicated to a meditation on the passion of Jesus Christ). With the help of a talking, inexhaustible rucksack, the young people fulfil their mission encountering various illustrations to the decadence, animal nature and sins of mankind at a certain time and place. The location where the novel unfolds is abstract and unspecified, it resembles time tunnels and encompasses various regions. References to the Bible and Christianity dominate in the novel and they are intertwined with history: there is a Casper Hauser prototype from the 19th century, the hedonism of the ancient Romans, skyscrapers, and neutralization of the brain among other things.” (Literary critic Kristine Karklina)

Contacts: Pierre Astier, pierre@pierreastier.com
Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

SantaBiblia_by_I.Zolude.pdf

Santa Monica. The Arkhangelsk Oblast is Viks’s encapsulates his life between the beginning of 1962 and July 1964, a period when he served in the Soviet army. Despite the story having taken place more than fifty years ago, he paints a vivid picture of the people, events and situations he saw there. He was helped in this not only thanks to the letters he exchanged with his family, but also his memories of those times which made such a lasting, visceral impression on him. Viks has said that he drew inspiration from the fact that the experience was akin to suddenly finding himself in a parallel world, his previous knowledge of which had merely been gleaned from science fiction books. Unlike fiction, however, it was all for real.

Contacts: izdevnieciba@jumava.lv
www.jumava.lv

SantaMonicaTheArkhangelskOblast_by_Viks.pdf

The Soviet Union was a project firmly based in scientific Communism and atheism. In spite of this, a few people in remote areas overgrown with alders kept on fostering centuries-old spiritual traditions. Eastern Orthodox Old Believers were one such group; they found refuge in eastern Latvia. They are at the center of Pauls Bankovskis’s novel Secrets. The book follows several generations of Old Believers, in a kaleidoscope of love stories and family tragedies. Against an ever-changing backdrop of ruling powers and regimes—and in spite of them—these communities still try to hold on to their old traditions. At first, supernatural beings live near the Old Believers. With time, though, their role in people’s diminishes, as the Old Believers’ culture loses the ability to fight against the influence of time.

Bankovskis said that Secrets is “the story of the author coming into contact with and falling in love with two things: an old-fashioned routine of daily life, determined by faith, and the modern-day actions dictated by this routine.” That’s why the subtitle of this book is “a borderland romance.” He does emphasize: “The overall theme of the book is to urge readers to imagine. Imagination is the very thing that can in a single moment transform scenes of saints and the past, painted in bright gold, into reality strengthened by faith.”

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

Secrets_by_P.Bankovskis.pdf

The collection Seeing Double and Other Stories was published in Latvian in 2011. It contains 13 of Crosshill’s stories, including 2011 Nebula nominee “Mama, We Are Zhenya, Your Son” and 2009 Writers of the Future winner “Seeing Double.” From quantum mechanics to flying pigs, from hive minds to passenger dragons, from time travel back to the USSR to a future where Russia rules the Baltics, Crosshill’s tales span numerous settings and genres.

“Seeing Double and Other Stories isn’t the first sci-fi short story collection
in Latvian literature. It’s special, though, because it simultaneously is and is not traditional science fiction. The author touches on a number of themes that have often come up in both literature and movies during the science fiction boom of
the last fifty years—mostly outside Latvia. These themes include future-era people under the control of technological achievements, A.I. trying to be just like humans, the paradoxes of time travel, and a creator’s responsibility for his creations. In his stories, [Crosshill] skillfully uses a technique I like to call the crooked mirror, or multi- faceted prism approach. By changing the angle from which we look at an object or event, he gives a grotesque slant to our point of view. This slant reveals the object to us from a very human, intimate perspective.” – Bārbala Simsone, literary critic.

Contact: Tom Crosshill, tom@tomcrosshill.com

SeeingDouble_by_T.Crosshill.pdf

Smouldering Fires, which the author herself referred to as a “phantasmagoria”, was Regīna Ezera’s sixth novel. It 
is composed of six stories, all of which take place in the small town of Mūrgale, and the main characters of each tale die at the end due to various coincidences. The novel culminates in the sixth story, where the reader learns that all of the earlier stories were a vision seen by the author. Ezera then speaks directly about creativity and about the relationship between literature and literary criticism, and the story includes a conversation between the author and a young journalist as well as with a stubborn colleague at the literary museum who ends up causing the author’s death. This novel is unusual in Latvian literature, because Ezera dared to make it less of a description of Mūrgale and its people, and more about her relationship with literature and the development of the novel’s fictionalised form. In this novel as well as in nearly all of Ezera’s works, one encounters the motif of the “tormenting past”: several characters have an event or transgression from their past that torments them, causing them to feel guilt and to suffer as a result. Aside from a postmodern resolution not seen in other Soviet-era literature, this novel’s most powerful aspect is found 
in its nuanced descriptions of the fates of individual characters and the complexities of their relationships.

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv 

SmoulderingFires_by_R.Ezera.pdf

This novel is about Baltic refugees 
and their lives in post-war England. The novel contains autobiographical elements, as the author includes details from his own life as a refugee. The plot focuses on events unfolding over the course of several months in the lives of the people living on Sola, an island just off the coast of England. Most of the novel is centred on a small segment of the island’s 170 inhabitants, and the main character is Arturs Skuja, a Latvian refugee. The most important events on the island and the experiences of its residents are revealed through the lonely, sensitive observations and emotions of this Latvian man still in the thrall of memories of his homeland. Skuja – who has worked as a field hand, raised chickens, and can also pilot a motor boat – observes and analyses the characters of his English and Irish co- workers, along with the English holidaymakers who come to Sola each year. This Latvian refugee contrasts with another strong figure in the novel: the swaggering Juhans Raudseps, a former Estonian officer. He embodies the tragic ex-soldier and, like other such characters struggling to cope with tragedy, he is shown quietly retreating from the outside world, unable to overcome his depression and longing for Estonia.

With a heavy dose of incredulity, Janovskis examines contemporary events in politics and the injustices experienced by refugees living in 
exile. He also describes the horrific anguish felt by refugees at times,
 which they must somehow work to overcome. Running throughout the novel are the themes of longing for one’s homeland and feeling deep guilt about not being able to help one’s country. Janovskis also explores how 
the relationships among refugees were often were the only thing that
 could bring them back to reality. There have been a number of theatrical adaptations of Sōla, and this novel continues to be popular for new generations of readers. Janovskis has won the hearts of Latvian readers, particularly for his descriptions of the tragedy of the refugee experience and life in exile.

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv

Sola_by_G.Janovskis.pdf

Ezeriņš often highlights his characters’ imperfections, showing them in a completely different, unique light. The most typical subjects of his novels are farmers, the eccentricities of the intelligentsia, and relations between Latvians and German manor lords. Literary specialist Anna Silgale has noted that the way Ezeriņš approaches his stories reveals something about life itself. He writes with the lightness characteristic of the French, but behind that lies a deep search for meaning typical of Northern Europeans. Through his stories, Ezeriņš shows that life is always full of beauty, but that life also demands truth and understanding, and that those that seek to destroy its harmony cannot just be forgiven. He shows the beauty of the world through the eyes of children, the brightness and vitality of those who are able to transcend mundane everyday life, and the power of those who seek only personal insights. The author plays with language. He doesn’t need much to express what he means to say. Behind his playful style one finds eternity, human life and
its rules – this is why his characters are often carefree, until one of life’s unsettling truths echoes throughout their existence.

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

Jana Egle’s second collection of short stories, Strangers or Milenkiy ty moy (2018) consists of eight stories named for their protagonists: Margarita, Harold, Alyevtina, Sandris, Theophil, Adrian, Veronika and Carrie. Each narrative is closely connected to the others; this is revealed when reading the stories one after the other, in sequence. Egle has succeeded in incorporating a wider characterization of the period in each story. Through the stories of Margarita, Harold, Sandris, Theophil, Adrian, and Carrie we catch a glimpse of contemporary life; through the story of Alyevtina we are introduced to the harsh realities of the Soviet era; but Veronika’s life story reaches back to events that took place during World War II. The collection could also be regarded as a novel in multiple voices, or an episodic novel.

The underlying thread of the stories is about the relationships between Latvians and Russians, estrangement that can form between people, about the way we are able or unable to form relationships, and about the way that the foreign or unknown can suddenly become familiar and close, or vice versa. Egle herself says: “Strangers or My Darling is about bonds that have been broken. About strangers who in fact are very close, and their fate. No one knows whether estrangement can be reversed and a relationship given new life. Somebody has to have the courage to take the first step to overcome the passage of time, wrongdoings, a sense of guilt.”

Contact: Eva Jansone, eva.jansone@la.lv

StrangersOrMilenkiyTyMoy_by_J.Egle.pdf

Though Straumēni is written in prose, Virza called this work a long poem. Using a Neo-Classical approach, the author tells a story set in the 19th century, on a country homestead in the southern region of Zemgale. At the heart of this work are the author’s childhood memories and the stories he heard from his grandparents about the idyllic life of Latvian peasants. The world depicted in this book is imbued with a mythical sensibility, 
the yearly cycles described in it involving people as well as other living creatures. Along with work and responsibilities, the rhythms of nature 
and the mind change with the passage of time. For example, the entire household participates in growing and harvesting flax, and the linen fabric – which is a product of this work – serves as a symbol of unity for the people of Straumēni. Therefore, this process and its result must come from the entire family’s shared labour.

The central figure in Straumēni is not any one person, but instead the entire Straumēni household. The reader is introduced to the traditional Latvian way of life as a welcomed guest, to whom the family shows 
the material and spiritual meaning of all things, seemingly outside of 
the context of time or history. The expressive story-telling style brings scents, tastes, and colours to life and makes this work thrilling as well as meditative. The language is euphonious and makes it easy to surrender 
to the flow of the story. In 1934, the well-known Latvian prose writer Jānis Veselis wrote the following about Virza and Straumēni: “He is a typical indoor poet filled with the constant alarm of a foreign time, which never stops and in the end changes everything.” At the end of his description, Veselis refers to Virza’s work as one of the brightest and happiest Latvian books, adding: “And this is why Straumēni is a bright and joy-filled book, it’s because a person isn’t left all alone with the sorrows and emptiness of the world.”

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv 

Straumeni_by_E.Virza.pdf

This novel highlights the significance of teachers and education in 20th-century Latvia. Akmentiņš strives to single out the heroic endeavors of rural teachers – the nurturing of a new generation of intelligentsia to replace those previously deported and exiled. Then novel is structured as a hyper-lively reality in the modernist spirit, which also echoes the atmosphere of Khrushchev’s political thaw. Akmentiņš’ heroes might misplace their cause and lose their lives, yet they refuse to play the part of the victim, instead getting by on their wits and cunning, a characteristic of peasants in Latvian folklore. The new post-war generation and the contradictions of Khrushchev’s era are diverse and interesting themes, demanding a vivid dualism – hunger and the desire to live, modern science and fashion, the theory underpinning the Party versus its true face. Competitive in everything, two sisters intend to uphold the professional tradition of their pedagogical family.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

Teachers_by_A.Akmentins.pdf

This novel is mostly about the bureaucracy that spreads, disease-like, throughout the whole country, including pre-school education esatblishments. Even the Latvian Ministry of Economics admits that the high levels of bureaucracy are responsible for the nation’s low level of competitiveness. What is bureaucracy all about? It’s mostly about a lack of trust, justified by the need to exert control, about the feeling of guilt so characteristic of Latvians, which they often describe as a sense of responsibility and a desire for self-improvement. It’s about fear, often defined as cautiousness but which basically is simply fear. It’s a story about the desire of one group of people to fit life into a specific legal framework while another group wishes to live freely and creatively. And it’s about the balance required between these two wishes. In many aspects, this novel is about balance. One character in the book falls into a coma, losing his physical balance, while another fails to keep her psychological balance and ends up in a psychiatric hospital.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

TheBannedPiano_by_M.Berzins.pdf

The novel is about women who are standing — some waiting for their date to arrive, some having just stood up after kneeling in prayer, and hundreds of them at the Ravensbrück concentration camp where they have been ordered to stand as punishment until the Nazi guards find Katrīna Vaica who has managed to break free for the second time. They have been standing there for three days already. One of them is about to die shortly.

The novel is in three parts: Violeta, Magdalēna and Duks. They are sent in different periods from 1941 till 2006. Each chapter is marked by a year. The plot unites all three main heroines of the novel, but the ties that connect their lives are revealed only at the very end.

The three main heroines of the novel:

Violeta is a prisoner at Ravensbrück, later working at a brothel in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Magdalēna is a woman living in Rūjiena, Soviet Latvia, she suffers from a psychological condition which is combined with high emotional intelligence. She deeply longs after an intimate relationship with a man.

Duks is a free-thinking young girl in the 1990s in Latvia who is experiencing first-hand the emotional weight of the changing times on people around her. She grows up to be a writer who has two daughters and ends up writing a novel about the holocaust.

The novel has other heroes and heroines: Lidija is a homosexual woman in Soviet Latvia who has just returned from her deportation to Siberia; Meibla, born to Violet while the latter was only partially conscious, clueless as to who her father is, is now a psychoanalyst and lives in America; Kārlis, who works as a personnel physician at the Ravensbrück concentration camp; Blondie, at first, hired as a carer of Kārlis' rich grandmother, and later, out of love for Kārlis, gets a job at the Ravensbrück concentration camp as a warden; Erlens, whose prototype is Irmfried Eberl, Commander of the Nazi death camp Treblinka; Ilze, who returns to Soviet Latvia after being imprisoned at the Kengir Gulag.

The novel’s conceptual layers address the objectification and “functionalization” of women in all three of these periods.

The novel touches on the testimonies of women who worked at the brothels of Nazi Germany frequented by the prisoners of the camps, of homosexual women in Soviet Latvia, of deported children who managed to return to Soviet Latvia, and people who survived the horrors of deportation and have never been able to return to normality, and of contemporary women who are witnessing the consequences in the reactions and emotional states of all these traumatised individuals who also happen to be their grandmothers, mothers, fathers and significant others.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

TheBeautifulOnes_by_I.Gaile.pdf

The Cage is about an architect, Edmunds Bērzs, who is locked up in a cage in the forest by a criminal, Kārlis Dindāns. Criminal investigator Strūga is searching for the architect, who seems to have disappeared without a trace, and in the process, he gradually gets to know Bērzs – a typical representative of the middle class. He stumbles by chanceonto the tracks of Dindāns, who out of some inexplicable jealousy is keeping Bērzs captive in a cage usually used for horses. In this cage, Bērzs is able to survive on nuts, mushrooms, pigeons; he is also cured of his gout and loses unwanted weight. He reconsiders his life and his relationship to society. Bērzs also has time to review his life and his relationship to society and focus on existential reflections onhis own position in the cage, the cage within himself, and the problem of the cage in society. The novel has retained its value and relevance even in the present day, even under a completely different economic and social system.

Contacts: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv

The Cage_excerpt_scan_ENG.pdf

The Cattle Express is a contemporary Latvian author’s effort to pinpoint both his personal identity and a universal human one; he seeks to combine both into a coherent whole. Two plotlines run parallel in this text: the first takes place in Latvia in the first half of the 20th century; the second, in 21st-century New York City. Crosshill’s story of occupation, deportations, war, and the authoritarian regime of Kārlis Ulmanis – the first Latvian Prime Minister – runs side by side along a tale of the modern world of Wall Street – which comes with a promising life full of possibility.

Contact: Tom Crosshill, tom@tomcrosshill.com

SeeingDouble_by_T.Crosshill.pdf

The novel The Counterfeit Faust or a Corrected and Expanded Cookbook gained great popularity and almost cult status among Latvian intellectuals and artists at the time. In it, the author plays with literary traditions and possibilities to an extent not seen before in Latvian literature. As in most of Zariņš’s other literary works, this novel contains elements of Postmodernism, which was also extremely important in Western literature at that time. These elements include breaking down the divide between “high” and “low” culture, playing with cultural heritage, and undisguised quoting/rephrasing/parody. The novel takes place in the 1930s and during the Second World War in Rīga, mostly among a mix of artists and intellectuals. The central character is a young writer and composer named Kristofers Mārlovs who goes to meet Trampedahs, a chef who is past his prime, to secure publication rights for 
his new cookbook in exchange for the elixir of youth. As in Goethe’s story, 
the beautiful Margarēta also appears in the novel, though later the author switches the roles of the characters around, turning Trampedahs-Faust into the villain while Mārlovs-Mephistopheles becomes a fragile victim. The novel contains a great deal of parody and self-parody, as well as actual historical figures and places which are merged with fiction. Real recipes are given an important position in the text. These and other features make it possible to call Viltotais Fausts a genuine example of Postmodern literature, though it is not known whether the author knew about this artistic movement when he was writing his novel.

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv

Viltotais_Fausts_by_M.Zarins.pdf

The Day’s Burden is one of the earliest and most important modernist works of Latvian prose, and was seen by the author’s contemporaries as having been inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses. Veselis had also published a partial translation of Ulysses, as well as a discursive essay about it. The author Dzintars Sodums, who also translated Ulysses, has praised Dienas krusts highly, while Jānis Rudzītis named it in the Latvian refugee newspaper “Latvija” as one of Latvia’s best works of prose, with the greatest likelihood of receiving recognition outside of Latvia because “everything local in it is imperceptibly woven together with overarching themes and overlaid with a nuanced plot.”

The plot centres on a tragic love story, though fundamentally The Day's Burden is a deep examination of Rīga’s working classes. The book focuses on the intertwining lives of the residents of a tenement house over the course of 24 hours, during which several romantic dramas and personal crises arise and are resolved, occasionally overlapping with the comical events that occur each hour. These connections were very important
to Veselis, and to emphasise them he created horoscopes for all of the characters before writing the book.

The book’s publishers, “Valters un Rapa”, wrote: “Veselis has created a new vision of the city in Latvian literature, which, like a living organism with its chaotic motion down labyrinths of monotonous streets and alienation within buildings walls, can defeat and destroy a person’s individuality.”

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv

TheDaysBurden_by_J.Veselis.pdf

The Dead Don’t Forgive is set in a fantasy world where emotions are magic and magicians are both powerful and vulnerable. On the one hand, they can exert near total control over commoners, who do not possess comparable abilities; on the other hand, they can be emotionally unstable and, thus, easily manipulated by other magicians. The story is told from the perspective of Vega, a gifted young woman who began training as a magician but quit before completing the full course, defying her master. Haunted by memories of that experience and carrying a deep resentment for all magicians, she hides her special skills and lives as a commoner even though this is a crime that carries a severe punishment. 

Contacts: Bārbala Simsone, barbala.simsone@zvaigzne.lv 

TheDeadDontForgive_by_I.Melgalve.pdf

Worried about the increasingly tense relationship of their parents, little sister Krista calls her brother Ritvars in Birmingham, where he has been working for several years and asks him to come home. When Ritvars arrives to his native Riga, he finds out the painful truth: their father has been unable to cover their bank loan, and the Leidums family is on the brink of losing their mortgaged flat. Ritvars understands that he needs to do something to help … This novel abounds in everything to capture readers’ attention – an engaging plot, exciting chases, the criminal underworld, bankers and entrepreneurs, friendship and love, lies and betrayal, greed and honour. The action takes the reader to Spain, the UK and Latvia in a fast-paced thriller that is sure to keep up the suspense until the very end.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

TheDebtCollectors_by_A.Bukss.pdf

At the beginning of the novel The Farmer and the Devil, the retired Latvian army officer Krasts is building his new farm. Together with his wife Aina and her father Andrāns, he works tirelessly to complete it, turning the surrounding spruce forest into pastures and putting up new farm buildings. However, a devil, a figure in Latvian tradition who is more of a trickster than a diabolical villain, has lived in this part of the forest for centuries and is angered by the destruction of his home, so he directs a series of misfortunes at the farmer – a beautiful woman named Manga, lack of money, etc. – to try and make him leave. At first the farmer is somewhat susceptible to the devil’s temptations, but in the end he pulls himself together and defeats them, so that good triumphs after all at the end of the novel.

According to his contemporaries, Jaunsudrabiņš’ inspiration for this novel came from watching sap drip from a birch tree. This prompted him to imagine the devil as a symbol of primordial nature, which – as the author would later say himself – manifests in physical desire and material temptation, all of which are defeated by the farmer’s virtuous hard-working character. The character of the metaphorical devil in a novel which is otherwise entirely realistic prompted considerable discussion at one point. Ultimately, Jaunsudrabiņš became involved in these discussions himself and reminded readers in the newspaper “Jaunā daiņa” in 1934 that gods in early literature would also often be described realistically. In his opinion this same artistic technique could be used in the 20th century; even though humans had acquired godlike powers, this very same power had made them increasingly anxious and, since readers were seeking “the kind of peace that’s found only in fairy tales”, the author wanted to give this to them.

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv

TheFarmerAndTheDevil_by_J.Jaunsudrabins.pdf

This is a story of railwayman Linards who, during Nazi occupation, witnesses two trains crashing into each other – an accident caused by human error. Despite getting out of the wreck alive, the survivors are clearly still headed to their deaths. Amongst the many victims, Linards finds a mute child of about eleven years old and is faced by a terrible dilemma – should he report her or seek another solution. Undecided and hesitant, intimidated by one of his workmates, he simply hopes that a way out will somehow present itself. Going to the police quarters, he encounters Lelde, the wife of the Latvian head of police in the service of the Nazis. By chance, she happens to be childless. However, when he tells her about the child she reacts violently, accusing him of unlading onto her the burden of deciding whether to report the girl or not and thus seal her fate.

TheGirlFromNowhere_by_V.Kaijaks.pdf

In this novel, events evolve during the late 1930s at the time of president Kārlis Ulmanis’ authoritarian regime. This period in Latvia is often associated with images of a burgeoning economy, social stability, and the swelling of national pride; at the same time, these are the years when concepts such as “reduced value individuals” – individuals who are perceived to be a threat to the future happiness of the nation – were also disseminated. Popular in Europe, the concept of eugenics has also infiltrated Latvia, creating negative attitudes toward mental health patients. Magdalēna, the novel’s protagonist, has been raped and
is subsequently diagnosed as mentally ill in a psychiatric clinic. There, she meets Kārlis, a young, progressive psychiatrist whose views on the treatment of mental illness have been influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytical teachings.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

TheGlassShards_by_I.Gaile.pdf

In this novel we meet Taņa, a young Latvian woman on an intense quest for her own identity. As the novel unfolds, Taņa’s search becomes intertwined with the responsibility she feels for her children, falling in love and being in love, her countless losses and rebirths. After she is abandoned by her husband, Taņa suddenly finds herself alone with three children. She plunges into adventures – losing herself, then finding herself again. She gets involved in various messes, but never hangs her head; she is the character who might cry briefly, but then always gets up, dusts herself off with a smile, and carries on. The Little Affair offers us a cross-section of an untamed young woman’s world, where all moral judgment is left up to the reader.

Contact: Dace Rukšāne, ruksane@gmail.com

TheLittleLoveAffair_by_D.Ruksane.pdf

“The Vendene Lotus Flower” is a novel about the Latvian writer and poet Jānis Poruks (1871–1911). Once upon a time, there were novels that made you forget the existence of time and space, novels where every detail could almost be touched, smelled and tasted, every character was a rich multicolour universe gradually and slowly unfolding in harmony with his or her surroundings. The spirit of the 19th-century epic novel is long since left in the past, but Inga Žolude’s “The Vendene Lotus Flower”, dedicated to the romanticist poet and prose writer belonging to that era, Jānis Poruks, somehow manages to bring it back. Getting to know the life of the Druviena's peasant son in the dazzling Elbflorenz, Dresden, following his years of apprenticeship and mentorship, Sturm und Drang, peace and creativity, all while being mindful of where strange eyes are not welcome, the reader is allowed closer to Poruks than ever before. Žolude as if becomes Poruks, shunning the opportunity to entertain self-expression and giving herself over to the different time, different eyes, voice and writing hand. Of course, we don’t and never will know if Poruks would recognise himself and his time in this novel, but for us, the 21st-century readers, Inga Žolude has created a rather likely image of a world that existed in his time. She does it without the ironic suggestion that it is impossible to depict the past today and everything is but an interpretation or a game. And she does it without resorting to clichés – the writer is neither a pale weak boy from a family of poor folk pure in heart nor a possessed madman; he, the Vendene lotus flower, is multidimensional and human, humbly approached by Inga Žolude. (Zanda Gūtmane)

I.u017dolude_Vendenes lotospuku0327e_excerpt_EN_By Uldis Balodis.docx

The Manuscript  is a part of the Riga Detective (Rīgas detektīvs) series, but can be read as a standalone work. It concentrates on the behind–the-scenes aspects and intrigues of being a writer, exploring Riga in the late 20th century, its society, events, and processes. The most valuable manuscripts of the Latvian Writers Union, unpublished during the Soviet years, had been kept by Professor Brants, found by investigators drowned in his bathtub. In his drawer, they find a 1987 obituary for Jānis Paiders, but the famous author Nora Paidere’s unpublished novel With the Mark of Cain (Kaina zīmē) has disappeared from Professor Brants’ library. Her novel reveals a secret involving all of the main characters of The Manuscript – Alīse the librarian; Ilze the professor’s daughter; the publisher, and we learn over the course of the novel, the informeant Aigars Kalniņš, too; Nora Paidere’s son – the unappreciated translator Jēkabs Paiders; editor Aija Rozenberge, who like Professor Brants, has also been drowned. Andrejs Vanags, a lawyer, begins a thrilling investigation and discovers that Jānis Paiders, once a brilliant poet and a rising star during the Soviet years who died under mysterious circumstances, is the son of Nora and Professor Brants. As he starts to make sense of this puzzle, the trail ends up leading to Aigars Kalniņš.

Contacts: Renāte Neimane, renate.neimane@latvijasmediji.lv

TheManuscript_by_F.Ermlere.pdf

This is a short adventure novel, where the author employs a compilation method and combined texts with different styles and functions. 

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv 

The Mushroom Covenant tells the story of a young woman named Īva Baranovska, who goes to Ireland to earn money to pay off her debts and buy a flat back home in Latvia. Already interested in Celtic culture prior to her arrival in Ireland, Īva spends many hours listening to her colleague tell her local legends and myths, in which she begins to see connections with Latvian folk tales. Gradually, Īva grows tired of spending long days on the fields picking mushrooms and decides to become a prostitute. She slowly sheds her former self and matures, both sexually and spiritually, yet finds it difficult to remain connected to her own culture, which eventually gets reduced to Latvian food and cooking (the novel itself features several mushroom recipes serving as capstones to chapters). The playful, ironic prose of The Mushroom Covenant keeps the reader’s interest in the daily struggles of Īva, as she battles her way through the many difficulties facing her in Ireland before she decides to return to Latvia. The author’s and protagonist’s interest in the otherworldly is reflected in the parallels raised between Īva’s trials in Ireland and Latvian myths, as well as Celtic and Biblical legends.

Contact: Laima Kota, laima.kota@inbox.lv

TheMushroomCovenant_by_L.Kota.pdf

The Pearl Diver, which the author described as fantasy, is one of the earliest long prose works by Poruks. Its main character, Ansis, is from the countryside and comes to Rīga to study. He is passionate; a dreamer and an idealist. For Ansis, “pearl diving” means fulfilling your life’s goals: he wants to make his dreams come true, not just view them from a distance. But his life takes some difficult turns: his mother dies, he is unlucky in love, and he struggles with loneliness and, of course, the possibility that the world will never understand him. Ansis has no shortage of benefactors, including his mentor Talheims, his beloved Anna, and others. As the story progresses, Rīga comes to discover Ansis’s unique nature and he begins to meet new people. The moral of the story is that every reader has to find the “pearls” in their own life (there is also a theory that Poruks used “pearls” to refer to the hearts of good people). The story is partially autobiographical and in it Poruks appears to foresee his own fate. This story also contains a motif that was completely new to Latvian long-form prose: Ansis discovers not only the physical path he must take on his journey, but also the path to find himself.

This and other works by Poruks are characterised by the words
he wrote in a letter to his fiancée: “I was the first to include the concept
of modern art in the Latvian national element.” Literary specialist Viesturs Vecgrāvis compared Pērļu zvejnieks with Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) and Ludwig Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1796). Along with romantic elements, Poruks also weaves in reflections on the modern culture and philosophy of his time. This work is included in the Latvian Cultural Canon.

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

ThePearlDiver_by_J.Poruks.pdf

The Rascal is a harsh, apocalyptic thriller about the fate of civilization. The author describes a world ruled by fake culture and mediocrity, by selfishness and cruelty. In this world, foolishness and power are one and the same, and inescapably lead to loneliness, pain, and death. Is there any hope of surviving in a world like this? The author never complains or lectures—he simply states the facts and delivers a verdict.

Children are at the center of the novel. They’re the only ones who see, understand, and feel in earnest. They’re the only ones who could change the world, if that were still possible; they’re also, unfortunately, the most unprotected people in society. That’s why this it is a child who is entrusted with the most difficult mission in the novel. The novel’s hero is a street kid who has grown up in the gutter, on
the “wrong side of the tracks.” Child traders are in charge here, and our prankster- hero is unable to escape being sold into slavery. That’s how he becomes a toy for the rich—a child gladiator. At this point, the fallen, degraded mentality of global economy has devoured everything else. There’s nothing left to swallow but itself. And so the child gladiators head into their final fight...

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

TheRascal_by_J.Einfelds.pdf

The history of the orphanage of the red children starts in 1534 when Margot, the queen of Navarre, establishes Hôpital des Enfants-Dieu, later known as Hôpital des Enfants-Rouges, because of children’s uniforms in red – the colour of compassion. In 1615, the title of the orphanage was given also to a market, founded by Louis XIII. The scenes from the 16th century orphanage in Paris, featuring French characters open the novel and are continued between the four big parts of the novel, each focusing on one of the three main characters carrying “a gene” of the red children that is reborn in Latvia in the 21^st century, and a separate myth of the way children come into this world, for example, children are brought by a stork, or found. The last part of the novel intertwines all the three previously separate stories. The three main characters of the novel are Nadja, Mārīte, and Liesma. Nadja is a patient at a drug-addict institution, Mārīte is a nurse at the same institution, but Liesma is Mārīte's neighbour. Mārīte supports Liesma since she raises her son alone and encounters many difficulties. Liesma helps Mārīte to rescue Nadja. In the end they all reconcile with the core line of the life and fate, overcoming the notion of being an orphan in this life.

Contacts: Pierre Astier, pierre@pierreastier.com
Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dienasgramata.lv

TheRedChildren_by_I.Zolude.pdf

Nominated for the 2016 Annual Latvian Literature Award, this novel offers a glimpse into the everyday lives of Latvians thirty years ago, when Soviet power was in the process of abetting the country’s rapid economic collapse. However, the political climate suddenly shifted in favor of the basic human desire to live in prosperity, and the Soviets declared Perestroika. The novel revolves around
a communal apartment in Riga. Once the large, upmarket homes of the wealthy, during the Soviet years, these apartments were converted and shared by several families, who were forced to use the same kitchen and bathroom and often had
to keep their cooking utensils and food in their own rooms to prevent them from being stolen. The protagonists are products of the everyday reality existing at the time. They are of different nationalities, work in different fields, and have a totally different perception of life and yet, they share the same roof.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgrama.lv

TheRoom_by_L.Kota.pdf

The Story of Tille and the Dog Man is about two lonely people who experience suffering and deep injustice. They persist, though, through friendship and mutual understanding, and by taking care of each other. Tille, the protagonist, is a 7-year-old girl. She ends up alone and neglected after her mother’s death. The Dog Man, a drifter and recluse who goes to the tunnel to play his accordion every day, happens to be Tille’s neighbor. He lives in a small, one-room basement apartment, in a building that was meant to be torn down ages ago. The Dog Man has pets—a cat, and two dogs with unusual names: Prince and Monk. In time, Tille and the Dog Man become best friends. The little girl makes sure everything in the Dog Man’s house is neat and tidy, waits for him to come home every day, and tells the dogs stories. He, in turn, becomes a loving father-figure to Tille, and provides for her. At the end of the story, a representative from the local orphans’ rights association gets involved. She arrives with a policeman to take Tille to the orphanage. But Tille doesn’t want to live at the orphanage, and the Dog Man doesn’t want to hand her over to the authorities. As the argument escalates, both dogs attack the policeman, who defends himself, shooting and killing Prince in the process. These two authority figures leave, promising to come back. Tille and the Dog Man don’t wait around for them. Instead, they run away to the countryside in search of a better life, along with Monk the dog.

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

TheStoryOfTilleAndTheDogMan_by_A.Neiburga.pdf

Winner of several literature awards, The Taste of Lead is a narrative account focusing on a young Latvian man, Matīss, who seeks and eventually fails
to avoid siding with either power at war in Europe in 1940. Facing the challenges and conflicts experienced by every young man – the discovery of the existence of love, betrayal, good and evil, and, on a personal level, the taste of lead in his mouth. A vehicle for dealing with weighty issues, this novel is characterized nonetheless by the signature irony, wit, and a taste for paradox noted in Bērziņš’ other works. This book explores lines of division; those simple, qualifying lines that set a regular man apart from a hero, the tragically thin line separating peace from war, the demarcating line seen between words and actions, and the contrasting line between giving in and taking action.

The Taste of Lead satisfies the reader with the depth of its humanist voice. Set between the late 1930s and early 1940s, The Taste of Lead was published in 2015, becoming one of Latvia’s most widely debated and in-demand books. In 2016, director Valters Sīlis produced a stage version of the same title, The Taste of Lead, for the National Theatre of Latvia and is now in its third consecutive season. The Latvian Museum of Writing organizes tours of the places mentioned in the novel, and many schools have included it in their mandatory reading curriculum. An excerpt from this novel was included in the Dalkey Archive Press anthology Best European Fiction 2017.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv
 

TheTasteOfLead_by_M.Berzins.pdf

The novel is set 
in two fictional parishes – Slātava and Čangaliena – in the Vidzeme Governorate in the mid-19th century, following the end of serfdom when a new class of free peasant emerged, establishing their own farms
and homesteads. The story centres on the land-surveying work taking place at the time, in order to set the boundaries of the land intended
 for Latvian peasants. Several plotlines surround this central element: a dramatic love triangle, intergenerational conflict, criminal intrigue, and various episodes from domestic life which depict the nature of family life and society during that time. The novel’s main characters are Kaspars and Liena, members 
of the younger generation who, in the opinion of the authors, embody desirable Latvian moral ideals.

Contact: info@latvianliterature.lv

Written in the style of a diary, The Tin Scream centres on the world of a 1970s teenager, a world that refelcts the ongoing social and psychological processes of society. At the beginning of the book, Rugetta, the main protagonist, is attending school in the 6th grade and, on a friend’s recommendation, she starts keeping a diary. This reveals the everyday life at an elite Soviet school, friendships and betrayals, a protest over the presence of Russians and an admiration for Tarkovsky and world culture, including Bach and Shakespeare. There is also a realignment of ideals – hence the title of the novel, tin being a metal that is ductile and easily wrought, and the noise it makes when broken is called “the tin scream”. With this novel the writer offers readers a rich, evocatively drawn gallery of characters who have been delightfully and wittily rendered, despite the tragic circumstances of that era. The world-renowned Latvian theatre director Alvis Hermanis and his theatre company, the New Riga Theatre, staged a production based on motifs from the novel, and this too has enjoyed public acclaim. 

Contacts: Kaspars Eizentāls, kaspars.eizentals@petergailis.lv

TheTinScream_by_G.Repse.pdf

The novel The Well begins on the shores of a lake in the height of summer. Rudolf, a doctor from Rīga, is looking forward to spending some time away from work and plans to spend the time fishing on his own while lodging with an elderly couple on a lake. He comes into contact with the neighbours next door, the Tomariņi family, when he borrows their boat for his fishing trips. He meets Laura and her two children, Zaiga and Māris, her mother-in-law Alvīne and her sister-in-law Vija. For Laura, this encounter 
is a reminder of her wasted life, one of self-denial and her attempts to honour her responsibilities. For her children, it is a reminder of how much they lack a father figure. Attraction blooms between the quiet, slightly standoffish Laura and the confident, successful Rudolf, yet from the very beginning there is the feeling that the relationship is doomed. A crucial part of the story is the presence, or rather absence, of Laura’s husband Rihard, who is in prison for the murder of a friend he killed on a hunting trip while drunk. The fact that Rihard is soon to be released casts a shadow over any attraction Laura and Rudolf might have for each other. Rihard, from a distance and through his circumstances, has forced Laura to play the roles of perfect mother, perfect wife, and strong woman. Regīna Ezera skillfully blends the lives of all these people together, showing how the sins and life events of previous generations can echo and reverberate through the lives of their children and grandchildren.

Contact: info@akka-laa.lv

TheWell_by_R.Ezera.pdf

The novel The Widower and She-Wolf belongs to the genre of magical realism. In his first novel, the much loved Latvian poet, Leons Briedis, skilfully blends reality and fantasy, recounting tales of  life, love and destiny based on his very personal experience. Describing this novel, some critics have drawn parallels with “The Magic Mountain” by Thomas Mann. In order to recover from the loss of his wife, a widower spends time in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains, spending the night in an abandoned hunters’ cabin. The only living creature to keep  him company is a she-wolf he names Forestling. As his consciousness flows in circles, just as memories tend to, he draws comfort from nature - paying attention to every little detail of a plant or animal he comes into contact with. His story is dynamic and full of self-irony, a patchwork of life events and different cultures.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

TheWidowerAndSheWolf_by_L.Briedis.pdf

The Woman in Black (2011) is the final volume of the trilogy devoted to Latvia’s history in the 20th
century. Time in Reverse and March of the Clowns in the Market of Horrors told the story of the birth of Latvia and the Second World War, while this book introduces the reader to the day-to-day
realities of Soviet life. Former guerrilla fighters, Soviet veterans with memories of the front, rigged elections, and a young policeman who knows nothing of the culture or life during Latvia’s interwar independence, but still wants more than anything to find love and have recognition at work...however it is then that a mysterious woman in black appears, who brings with herself not just bad luck but also a giant diamond. The apple-green diamond has been moving for years from owner to owner, and as diamonds do, leaving in its wake dead bodies and ruined lives. Who will become the owner of this priceless stone? And what use is it in a country where the only real wealth exists in good relations with the party elite? Irony, extensive historical knowledge, and the ability to join events together into a thrilling and attention-grabbing tale are the reasons why Andris Kolbergs is deservedly called the master of the Latvian crime genre.

Contacts: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv

The story begins symbolically “five minutes” after the end of the Cold War. Two young spies from West Germany have crossed the East German border just two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall.They both observe the contrasts between the two separate parts of Germany. Their destination is the East German town of Jena, where a very famous optics factory possesses secrets from the Soviet military industry. East Germany has basically collapsed, and the director of the factory is prepared to hand over documents related to the secret optics of Russian tanks and spaceships. The German BND sends a young agent named Theodorus (Theo) and a lovely technical specialist, Beatrice, to fetch the documents. Theo is secretly in love with his colleague. As the pair approach the city, they notice activities at a nearby Soviet military base. The Red Army is still in East Germany. The West German agents drive past the base and are soon at the enormous optics factory. The director hopes to pursue a career in unified Germany, and he is prepared to hand over all of the information. Beatrice enters the director’s office and quickly starts to copy the documents. Then the unexpected happens. Armoured transport vehicles crash through the gates of the factor, helicopters land, and Russian troops flood into the territory.

Contacts: Mr. Otto Ozols ozols.otto@gmail.com