The German Book Office in New York City has chosen Baba Dunja's Last Love by Alina Bronsky, translated by Tim Mohr (Europa Editions, $16, 9781609453336), as its June Pick of the Month.
The GBO said: "Baba Dunja has decided to move back to her deserted hometown, Chernobyl--three decades after the great nuclear catastrophe. She moves back in her old house, alongside a handful of her former neighbors. Life in the prohibited area is peaceful and quiet, its residents enjoying the freedoms of living outside of modern society without responsibilities or rules to live by. All that changes when a strange man visits the town with a child, and the lives of the denizens of Chernobyl are forever altered."
Alina Bronsky was born in 1978 in the Soviet Union before emigrating to Germany as a teenager. She was nominated for the German Youth Literature Prize and the "Aspekte" Literature Prize in 2009 for her debut novel, Broken Glass Park, which was turned into a movie. The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, her second novel, was longlisted for the German Book Prize in 2010.
Tim Mohr is a translator, writer and editor who won the Three Percent award for translation in 2007 and translated Bronsky's second novel, The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine.
