Every Time We Say Goodbye

"A very remarkable book. It has been a long time since I've wanted to proselytize about a new book as much as I do about Ivana Sajko's Every Time We Say Goodbye . . . It's formally and narratively thrilling, a very slim novel that conveys a whole pressurized life. The translation, by Mima Simic, is extraordinary."--Garth Greenwell, author of Small Rain

A soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition and failure--Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads.

A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin. As the wheels turn, his mind feverishly clacks along, tracing his own past--and that of Europe--to a moment of violence he must flee, moving him further and farther away from the one person he loves.

Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family separated by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin--yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. Every Time We Say Goodbye is an extended soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition, and failure, and is a profoundly stark and furious novel.