Bedbugs

Holed up in her Zagreb apartment, reeling from the sudden death of her husband—whom she had married only days earlier—architect Gorana Hrabrov sets to writing a letter to her friend, uncovering everything that has happened in her life that has led her to penning this confession: from discovering bedbug bites on her hand to workplace romance and familial fallouts. Not even her many professional successes have saved her from constantly feeling like a lonely outsider, even when it comes to her family on the coast. Gorana’s attempt to find closure, and connection, is delivered in a delicately braided story that introduces English-language readers to Martina Vidaić’s impressive eye for detail embodied in prose that stands apart from so much contemporary Croatian fiction in how the central trauma is not related to war, but the intrinsic, and often isolating, difficulties of the human condition.