Rights Information

Rights sold
Croatia (Alfa)
France (Editions du Seuil)
Italy (La nave di Teseo)
Netherlands (van Gennep)
Spain (Ediciones Siruela)
USA (Archipelago Books)

Reviews

Lojze Kovačič is probably the most important Yugoslav writer you’ve never heard about. And probably one of a handful of the most important Yugoslav prose writers and novelists, period. ... [He] is one of the most important writers of our time, one who confirms our world in both text and deed.
-writer Miljenko Jergović for Croatian daily Jutarnji list

Newcomers is an emblem of what memory — personal memory, political memory, a place’s memory — can create from erasure ... Curiously hypnotic. Between the fetishized ordinariness of Karl Ove Knausgård and the theater of Elena Ferrante, Kovačič unfurls a ream of anecdotes and character descriptions, rambling, yet tightly told chronology of his family’s undeserved perdition as they descend deeper and deeper into moral and literal penury. – Los Angeles Review of Books

... this work achieves the panoramic effects of H.G. Adler’s Shoah trilogy by way of Joycean stream of consciousness. – Wall Street Journal
A powerful chronicle of conflict and upheaval within both a family and a country, as told, and experienced, by a young, engaging, clearsighted boy ... Kovačič skilfully depicts a tough, nomadic, hand-to-mouth existence in a city gripped by ethnic tension, rampant nationalism and the threat of war ... This fine novel is not only accessible, but deeply memorable. – Star Tribune

Author Biography

Lojze Kovačič (1928–2004) has established himself as a powerful Slovenian voice in the modern literary canon. His works articulate the limits of the human condition in an introspective and highly philosophical manner, whilst also exploring morality and existential topics such as life and death, displacement and exile, dream and reality. Although born in Switzerland, Kovačič moved to Ljubljana with his German mother and Slovenian father after their forced departure from their homeland and exile to Slovenia in 1938. As the acclaimed recipient of the Prešeren Award, Slovenia’s highest award for artistic achievement, in 1973 and a three-time winner of the Kresnik Award for best novel of the year in 1991, 2004 and 2016 – the latter being the Silver Kresnik Award – Kovačič was an accomplished author of both children’s and adult fiction who left behind a luminescent literary legacy and has been compared to great Central European writers such as Danilo Kiš, Sándor Márai, Imre Kertész and Ismail Kadare.