From the author of the award-winning The Censor’s Notebook, Kinderland is a novel about children whose parents have little choice but to work in other countries, told through the perspective of a young girl made responsible for her two brothers.
"Corobca's novel not only reports with tenderness and wit on the pain and patience of abandoned children, it also traces the economic, social and moral decay of the rural milieu with wide awake realism." —Andreas Breitenstein, New Zurich
With her parents gone in search of work, twelve-year-old Cristina must act as a mother to her two younger brothers. Through her eyes, we experience the feeling of wonderment and loneliness as they roam the streets of a contemporary Moldovan village. Her mother has gone to Italy, her father to Siberia, and the children grow up fast, imitating the gestures of the absent adults, and chasing their fading memories of normal family life.
Kinderland is the second novel by Moldovan novelist Liliana Corobca to be translated into English. The first was The Censor’s Notebook (2022), which won the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2023, remarkably so since it was also the translator, Monica Cure’s, first attempt at a book-length translation. Kinderland showcases Corobca signature ability to present grimness in a way that is also so full of life and a love of people, and a kind of curiosity that's gentle and forgiving of people's strangeness.
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LILIANA COROBCA was born in the Republic of Moldova. She made her debut with the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for debut awarded by the România literară magazine; the Prize for Prose Debut of the Republic of Moldova Writers’ Union and The Character in Inter‑war Romanian Novels (2003, translated into Italian and German). She is also the author of the novels A Year in Paradise (2005), Kinderland (2013, translated into German and Slovenian), which was a bestseller of Cartea Românească Publishing House at the Bookfest Book Fair 2013, a recipient of the Prize for Prose awarded by Radio România Cultural, and winner of the Crystal Prize at the International Festival in Vilenica, Slovenia, in 2014; and The Old Maids’ Empire (2015). She has also written a three-act monologue, Censorship for Beginners, published in 2014 in Austria. She has received grants and artists’residencies in Germany, Austria, France, and Poland.
