Fear of Barbarians

Translated by Christina E. Kramer\r\nGavdos: a remote island south of Crete, the southernmost\r\npoint of Europe, surrounded by an endless expanse of\r\nsea.\r\nTo Oksana, who has come from Ukraine with her friends\r\nto recover from illness in the aftermath of Chernobyl, it\r\nseems like a dream to live in a blue-and-white house\r\nwith a lemon tree.\r\nTo Penelope, a Greek woman who was married off to\r\nan unsuitable man by nuns from the convent where she\r\nspent her teenage years, it is a kind of prison.\r\nTheir two narratives, interwoven with other stories - of\r\nthe other women of the sparse community, of their own\r\npast lives and loves - are skilfully combined with themes\r\nof otherness and the notions of foreign and barbaric\r\nin this poetic and timely short novel by acclaimed\r\nMacedonian writer Petar Andonovski, winner of the\r\nEuropean Union Prize for Literature.\r\nTranslated from Macedonian