Nostalgic yet ironic; cruel yet merciful, most of the stories bring the reader to a childhood in a small town, where emptiness either presses in on you and pulls you back, or walks ahead of you, making you hurry to overtake its steps and keep moving forward.
– Marta Radeva, Portal Cultura
Short Stories, 100 pages, 2025
God’s Mercy
God’s Mercy is Yordanka Beleva’s fifth short story collection. It contains 17 new stories in which nostalgia and longing, loss and tenderness, childhood and immortality do not alternate but move in parallel. If we had to sum up the distinctive quality of these stories in a single word, that word would be restraint—this is how Rositsa Chernokozheva from the Institute for Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences defines Yordanka Beleva’s writing.
“Yordanka Beleva’s talent lies precisely in this measure, so difficult for a creator to achieve. Indeed, to take nothing away, yet to add nothing either.”
The meaningful title of the collection—God’s Mercy—as well as the story of the same name, suggest the idea of an antidote. The overall message of Yordanka Beleva’s writing lies in this: storytelling as an antidote.