The masterful English debut of Alhierd Bacharevic, a new voice from Belarus
Alicia and her brother Avi are imprisoned in a camp on the edge of a forest where children are trained to forget their language through therapy, coercion, drugs, and larynx surgery. The Leid (or Belarusian language) is considered a sickness to be cured and replaced by the only pure form of language, the Lingo (Russian). A contemporary Hansel and Gretel adventure, the children escape into the forest and end up in even greater danger... A feat of translation, Bacharevic's story is brilliantly rendered into English and Scots from Russian and Belarusian.
Alhierd Bacharevic grew up in a linguistically-torn country. Despite growing up speaking Russian, Bacharevic rebelled by speaking and writing in Belarusian. In the 1990's he was the founder and vocalist of the first Belarusian language punk band, Pravakacyja ('Provocation'). He is now an award winning author and his works have been translated into French, German, Czech, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian.
Title: Alindarka's Children: Things Will Be Bad
Author: Bacharevic, Alhierd
ISBN: 9781910895405
Binding:
Publisher: Scotland Street Press
Publication Date: 2020-09-30
Number of Pages: 350
Weight: 0.3871 kg
'What we get is a book that is both a translation and a collage-an independent, multilingual literary work. It is an ingenious response to the novel's polyphony and a tribute to the Scottish language that echoes the tribute Bacharevic pays to the Belarusian tongue.'-New York Review of Books
'You can take this book on many levels, from the philosophical and psychological analysis of what it does to a nation and a people to remove, control and suppress its mother tongue, to an exciting tale of two runaway children in a forest trying to survive on blueberries and avoid the threatening adults along their way.'-The Scotsman
'Kafkaesque and with elements of cyberpunk. Alhierd Bacharevic is the foremost figure of today's Belarusian literature.'-New Eastern European
'Bacharevic hits you in the eye with the truth, and it hurts.'-Maria Martysevich
