Let’s Go Home, Son

Let’s Go Home, Son – Ivica Prtenjača

A mother, a father and a son face illness and the new restrictions of a declared pandemic in the context of their native Croatia. The dream of returning as a family to the sun-soaked terrace of their home in Dalmatia is what inspires them to face – and conquer all. Ivica Prtenjača is a quiet novelist at ease in his craft, restrained in his narrative voice, while confident that his characters and their meandering fates will do their work on the reader. Let’s Go Home, Son has got everything it needs: family values, loss, guilt, shame, love, disappointment and cautious hope.

“Let’s Go Home, Son is a gorgeous, heartfelt book about a tight-knit family, an illness, and a desperate wish that must be granted. Autobiographical in part… [full of ] charming insights and details that add texture and a sense of refinement.”

Novi list

“Let’s Go Home, Son is a lithe novel, a fragment written at a time when we all struggled to breathe, each of us for our own reasons. Prtenjača’s elegant style surges with emotion and hidden undercurrents, like the course of a river.”

Tanja Tolić

O autoru

Ivica Prtenjača graduated from the Faculty of Education in Rijeka and is a publisher and prominent promoter of Croatian literature. As a presenter on Croatian Radio, he writes and hosts the shows ‘Mornings on 3’ and ‘My Choice’. Having published a number of poetry collections, and twice being awarded the Kiklop Prize for poetry book of the year – for Take Everything That Calms You (2006) and Cruelty (2010) – he made his prose debut in 2006 with the novel It’s Good, It’s Nice. In 2014, his novel The Hill garnered the V.B.Z. and Tisak Media award for best unpublished novel, which he won again in 2021 for Let’s Go Home, Son. Prtenjača’s poetry and prose have been translated into more than 20 languages. He lives and works in Zagreb.

O prevoditelju

David Williams holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Auckland. He has taught at the Universities of East Sarajevo, Belgrade, Novi Sad, and Auckland, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Leipzig Centre for the History and Culture of East-Central Europe and the University of Konstanz. He is the author of Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the East European Ruins (2013), and the translator of Dubravka Ugrešić’s Karaoke Culture (2011) and Europe in Sepia (2014), and of Miljenko Jergović’s Mama Leone (2013). He lives on the west coast of New Zealand.