Croatia, autumn 2022. The tourist season has ended, and Split settles into an uneasy quiet. Ines works the reception desk of a seaside hotel. Her mother, Katja, a cleaner, keeps the family afloat and cares for Ines and her younger brother, Mario. When Inspector Zvone is called to an abandoned factory on the city’s edge, he finds the body of seventeen-year-old Viktorija, daughter of a respected local doctor. The murder shocks the community and sends ripples through the lives of Ines, Katja, and Zvone—each forced to confront truths they would rather keep buried. As suspicion deepens and loyalties fracture, Mother of Sorrows becomes a devastating exploration of love, guilt, and denial. With quiet ferocity, it confronts us with a haunting question: what are we willing to sacrifice to protect those we love—and what are the consequences when we do?

“Mother of Sorrows,” translated from the Croatian by Matt Robinson, is told in short chapters from its various characters’ points of view. The story is a police procedural with benefits: an investigatory chronicle that explores issues of free will and fate (“there was something toxic and corrupting in their blood,” Ines thinks of her family) against a backdrop of consumerist glamour and moral decay — The Wall Street Journal

Translator bio
Matt Robinson (1978) is a former Reuters foreign correspondent. He translates books by Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian writers, including the works of the award-winning Croatian crime writer Jurica Pavičić.

Author bio
Jurica Pavičić (1965) is a Croatian novelist, screenwriter, short-story writer and journalist. His crime novel Red Water (published in Croatian in 2017 and in English in 2025) won ‘Le Point’ award and ‘Grand prix de la littérature policière’’ for the best European crime novel in 2021. The Sunday Times named the English edition of Red Water 'Best Crime Novel 2025'.

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A young man is gripped by one fear: that he’ll lose his mind. In his family, mental illness has shaped lives for generations, and time in psychiatric wards has become almost a rite of passage. His battle to avoid inheriting his grandmother’s suicidal behavior, his mother’s bipolar disorder, or his father’s bouts with alcoholism and depression spurs him to flee Germany for New York, via Paris and Vienna, only to end up in just the kind of mental institution that so terrified him. But he works there as a psychologist rather than undergo treatment as a patient himself, and learns that a person is always more than a diagnosis. In this picaresque novel, a potent blend of memoir and fiction, the protagonist is forced to confront the question he has avoided all his life: What is normal?

“Irresistible. A book that is at once grave and light, tender and tough, satirical and earnest.” — Siri Hustvedt, author of The Shaking Woman or a History of My Nerves and Ghost Stories

“Illuminating . . . moves at a roving pace . . . Botany of Madness is a riveting novel in which a man weighs mental illness with prismatic precision, his work involving scientific classifications, autofiction, and memory.” — Foreword Reviews

Translator bio
Alexandra Roesch has translated twelve works of fiction and nonfiction including writings by Hans Fallada, Seraina Kobler, and Stefanie vor Schulte, and has been awarded the inaugural John Calder Translation Prize. Based in Frankfurt, she holds an MA in translation from the University of Bristol.

Author bio
Leon Engler grew up in Munich and studied theater, film, and psychology in Vienna, Paris, and Berlin. He has published several plays and short stories and works as an author, psychologist, and lecturer in psychology and creative writing. Botany of Madness is his first novel.

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Gottland opens an unusual window on the history of Central Europe, in particular the part of it occupied by the Czechs. Mariusz Szczygieł presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Czechs as a nation, gathering together a wide-ranging cast of characters: the sculptor commissioned to build the world’s biggest statue of Stalin; the stage star who was Goebbels’ lover; Franz Kafka’s niece; Karel Gott, who won the “Most Popular Male Singer” award a record thirty-six times; and the Bata brothers, founders of a shoe empire that shod half the world. Many of these people’s lives were marked by tragedy as they fell victim to the historical events that engulfed twentieth-century Europe. One of Europe’s preeminent investigative journalists and a devoted Czechophile, Szczygieł is uniquely placed to capture this country and its people through these bizarre, tragic stories. Built from meticulous research and hundreds of interviews, Gottland is a mesmerising and offbeat tour of the nation that gave us Franz Kafka, Václav Havel and Tom Stoppard.

“One of those delightfully unclassifiable books... Szczygieł is strange and funny, constantly off at jaunty tangents.” Julian Barnes, Book of the Year, The Guardian

”Extraordinary... Gottland is one of the funniest books I have read and one of the shrewdest about what it was like to live under fascism and communism, the experience of so much of Europe in the last century. It is not about Czechoslovakia or Poland or even limited to Mitteleuropa, but about how one copes with tyranny and corruption and preserves a conscience... Important and enjoyable.” The Spectator

”Many of the stories in Mariusz Szczygieł's portrait of Czechoslovakia could have come from the pages of Kafka... Absorbing, offbeat history.” The Financial Times

”Non-fiction stories from Czechoslovakia, which show a country more fantastical than even its wildest literature led us to believe.” The Guardian

”Gottland offers an indelible account of the ravages of 20th-century totalitarianism and the way it continues to pollute human thought and behavior in the 21st century.” New York Times

Translator bio
Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists and reportage authors, as well as classics, biographies, essays, crime fiction, poetry and children’s books. Her translation of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by 2018 Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk was shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International prize. For ten years she was a mentor for the Emerging Translators’ Mentorship Programme, and is a former co-chair of the UK Translators Association. Her recent published translations include Not There by Mariusz Szczygieł, reportage about (broadly understood) loss, and as compiler and co-translator, The Penguin Book of Polish Short Stories.

Author bio
Mariusz Szczygieł is one of Europe’s most celebrated journalists. A reporter for Gazeta Wyborcza, he is the author of a number of books of reportage about the Czech Republic and Poland. His books have been published in twenty-one countries and have been awarded the Europe Book Prize and the Prix Amphi, among other honours. From 1995–2001, he hosted a popular talk show on Polish television. Szczygieł runs the Institute of Reportage in Warsaw, a creative writing reportage school, and Dowody na Isnienie, an independent publishing house. Not There won the Nike Award and Nike Readers' Award in Poland on publication in 2019.

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