Sofia Literary Agency represents Bulgarian authors and titles in the field of literary fiction, poetry and children’s books.
The narrator in „Four Minutes“ collates excerpts from news articles, listens to her own (internal) voice, to the stories of people she meets on the way, looks into the past, confronts traumas and, pulling the reader out of their comfort zone, asks important questions about our world, about life in exile, about people who are excluded, abandoned, homeless. A beautiful, intricately woven and exciting book.
—Wioletta Greg
Giving voice to people living on the periphery in post-communist Bulgaria, Four Minutes centres around Leah, an orphan who suffered daily horrors growing up, and now struggles to integrate into society as a gay woman. She confronts her trauma by trying to volunteer at the orphanage, and to adopt a young girl—a choice that is frustrated over and over by bureaucracy and the pervasive stigma against gay women. In addition to Leah’s narrative, the novel contains nine other standalone character studies of other frequently ignored voices. These sections are each meant to be read in approximately four minutes, a nod to a social experiment that put forth the hypothesis that it only takes four minutes of looking someone in the eye and listening to them in order to accept and empathise with them. A meticulously crafted social novel, Four Minutes takes a difficult, uncompromising look at modern life in Eastern Europe.