Dark Mother Earth
SynopsisPlot
As a novelist, Matija makes things up for a living. Not yet thirty, he’s written two well-received books. It’s his third that is as big a failure as his private life. Unable to confine his fabrications to fiction, he’s been abandoned by his girlfriend over his lies. But all Matija has is invention. Especially when it comes to his childhood and the death of his father. Whatever happened to Matija as a young boy, he can’t remember. He feels frightened, angry, and responsible… Now, after years of burying and reinventing his past, Matija must confront it. Longing for connection, he might even win back the love of his life. But discovering the profound fears he has suppressed has its risks. Finally seeing the real world he emerged from could upend it all over again.
Story
About this book
Matija is a young Croatian novelist with two well-received books behind him and a third that failed. His professional trouble runs alongside a personal collapse: his girlfriend has left him over his constant lying. The habit reaches far beyond his fiction. For years he has built false versions of his own childhood, filling gaps in memory with invention.
At the center of those gaps is his father's death, an event he cannot clearly recall. What remains is fear, anger, and a sense of responsibility whose origins he does not understand. Now, not yet thirty, Matija sets out to stop reinventing his past and face what actually happened to him as a boy.
His wish to reconnect with the woman he lost gives him a reason to try, though the memories he begins to uncover carry risks of their own. Kristian Novak is an award-winning Croatian author, and this is his first novel to appear in English. It examines how a private mythology can work as both shelter and trap.
