A timely parable on the perils of growing old and infirm in an unforgiving modern world - by the author of the acclaimed Trieste

"Belladonna is brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable . . . One of the truly outstanding novels of recent years" EILEEN BATTERSBY, Los Angeles Review of Books

** Winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2018**
** Shortlisted for the inaugural E.B.R.D. Prize for Literature **
** Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize **

An excoriating work of fiction that references the twentieth century's darkest hours

Andreas Ban is a writer and a psychologist, an intellectual proper, but his world has been falling apart for years. When he retires with a miserable pension and finds out that he is ill, he gains a new perspective on the debris of his life and the lives of his friends. In defying illness and old age, Andreas Ban is cynical and powerful, and in his unravelling of his own past and the lives of others, he uncompromisingly lays bare a gamut of taboos.

Andreas Ban stands for a true hero of our times; a castaway intellectual of a society which subdues every critical thought under the guise of political correctness. Belladonna addresses some of the twentieth century's worst human atrocities in a powerful fusion of fiction and reality, the hallmark of one of Europe's finest contemporary writers.

Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth

Dasa Drndic interweaves fiction, reality, history, and memory to terrific effect . . . Drndic attacks history with a novelist's sensibility and has produced a poignant meditation on love and loss, the insanity of war and the legacy of human cruelty.