My Father’s Books
SynopsisPlot
Weaving a story from the threads of his parents' lives from 1926 to 1976, Luan Starova offers a child's-eye view of personal relationships in shifting political landscapes and an elegiac reminder of the enduring power of books to sustain a literate culture. Through lyrical waves of memory, Starova reveals his family's overlapping religious, linguistic, national, and cultural histories. His father left Constantinople as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the young family fled from Albania to Yugoslav Macedonia when Luan was a boy. His parents, cosmopolitan and well-traveled in their youth, and steeped in the cultures of both Orient and Occident, find themselves raising their children in yet another stagnant and repressive state. Against this backdrop, Starova remembers the protected spaces of his childhood&;his mother&;s walled garden, his father's library, the cupboard holding the rarest and most precious of his father's books. Preserving a lost heritage, these books also open up a world that seems wide, deep, and boundless.
Story
About this book
Luan Starova's My Father's Books traces his family's story across fifty years, from 1926 to 1976, through three different political regimes. His father left Constantinople as the Ottoman Empire was breaking apart, and the family later moved from Albania to Yugoslav Macedonia when Luan was still a child. The book follows these displacements through the eyes of a boy growing up in a household shaped by languages, religions, and cultures that no longer fit easily into the borders drawn around them.
Starova's parents had been cosmopolitan travelers in their younger years, familiar with both Eastern and Western traditions. In Macedonia, they found themselves raising children inside another restrictive state. Against that political background, the book turns to the small, guarded spaces of childhood: a walled garden kept by his mother, a library assembled by his father, and a cupboard where the rarest volumes were stored. These books carried a heritage that the family's successive governments had little interest in preserving.
My Father's Books is the first volume in Starova's multivolume Balkan Saga. It moves between personal memory and broader historical shifts, using the fate of a private library as a way to measure what political upheaval costs a single family over decades.
