Kamelia Panayotova’s debut novel is a painful auto-fictional rumination on the trail of a lost home and failed parenthood. A beautiful story about abandonment and living the abuse of mind and body. Such a title will continue to be eerily relevant as long as the world continues to view women as “pieces of meat.”
– Antonia Apostolova, Literary Conversations
Novel, 193 pages, 2023
ANNE
How can a girl cope with the trauma of unloving parents who abandoned her at the age of eight? Or with her strict grandmother who is trying to convince her that she doesn’t need her parents? These questions have been chasing Anne for her entire life. At the age of 26, she recalls every detail from her childhood, fears it as she did when she was little. Anne can still hear the screaming of her mother confronting her drunk father, she can feel the touch of her uncle sliding his hand over her leg. She’s trying to satisfy her grandmother’s desires, trying to find her way back to her mother even though she was rejected so many times in the past. But with the painful, unexpected death of the only person who has never hurt her, she finds herself heading back home – to the same small village, towards the same people she was trying so hard to escape from. Despite its intense grief, this novel is a poetic and lively attempt to deal with one’s own destructive inclinations. It aims to plant the seed of belief in the possibility of transformation.