"A story in which dreams and phantasms are kinder... than the random brutality of the concrete world... [the] telling is not just magic, but enchantment." -- Rebecca Makkai, New York Times Book Review



Thirteen-year-old Emma grows up under an Eastern European dictatorship where oppression seems eternal. When her dissident parents die in a car accident, she's taken to an orphanage, only to be adopted soon after by a grandmother she has never met.



While her homeland is shattered by a violent revolution, Emma comes to learn the ways of her new grandmother, who can tell fortunes from coffee dregs, cause and heal pain at will, and shares her home with the ghost of her husband. But this is not the main reason her grandmother is treated with suspicion and contempt by most people in town. They suspect her or her husband of having been involved in the disappearance of top secret government files.



As Emma learns her family history, she begins to see that, for her grandparents, the alternate reality shaped by magic was their only form of freedom.



A New York Times Editors' Choice



"Dragomán puts us in the middle of our most wondrous and terrifying childhood fairytales, somehow unhazing their dreaminess and replicating their electrifying uncertainty all at once." -- Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of Inland and The Tiger's Wife



"As sinister as it is stunningly beautiful. It is the work of a master." -- Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth



"Nested in this novel's magical setting is the darkly-glinting stone of a turbulent political history of secrets, betrayals, ghosts, and memory... It will pierce you like a knitting needle." -- Forrest Gander, Pulitzer Prize wininng author of Twice Alive

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• Literature & FictionLiterary FictionRomance

• Publication Date: January 17, 2024
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 488 Pages
• File Size: 30 KB