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Queenless
Translated from Polish by Maggie Zebracka.
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- Paperback published on 30/07/2024
- Page count: 256 pages
- ISBN: 9781739751593
Quick take
Beautiful. Moving. Intimate. These are the adjectives I clutch at to describe Queenless, but none of them adequately describe the experience of reading it.
Why we love it
Written in short, exquisite fragments, this is a book that I devoured greedily. Rich with imagery, the writing was incredibly satisfying but I always wanted more. Sparsely packed pages sometimes contain only a single sentence, a form that encourages a swift turning of the pages, a single-sitting read. What’s it actually about? Loss. Family. The push-pull of a mother-daughter relationship. We quickly become acquainted with the details of the narrator’s mother. Her habits, her cooking, her sense of style, the make-up she uses, her opinions, her force. The details and specifics that make a life. ‘Queenless’ is the word for a honey bee colony without a queen. This is the story of a daughter navigating the world after her mother. And it’s a beautiful and brilliant read.
Synopsis
Marcinow finds her own language to describe loss and extreme intimacy: trance-like, strong, witty, yet trembling, cruelly honest, full of tenderness and longing. Playing with form and content, Queenless is a fierceless story about the desire to live; about great, crazy and greedy love between a mother and a daughter.
About the author
Mira Marcinów (Szczecinek, 1985) is a writer and assistant professor at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. For her academic work on psychology, she was shortlisted for the Polityka Science Award (2019) and won the Prime Minister's Award (2015). Queenless is her fiction debut. It won the 2020 Polityka Passport Prize and was shortlisted for numerous prizes, including the 2021 Nike Literary Award.
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