Alicia and her brother Avi are imprisoned in a camp on the edge of a forest where children are trained to forget their language through therapy, coercion, drugs, and larynx surgery. The Leid (or Belarusian language) is considered a sickness to be cured and replaced by the only pure form of language, the Lingo (Russian). A contemporary Hansel and Gretel adventure, the children escape into the forest and end up in even greater danger…    A feat of translation, Bacharevic’s story is brilliantly rendered into English and Scots from Russian and Belarusian.

Review
“Bacharevic’s rich, provocative novel offers a kaleidoscopic picture of language as fairy-tale forest, as Gulag, as monument, as tomb, as everlasting life.”―The New York Times

‘What we get is a book that is both a translation and a collage―an independent, multilingual literary work. It is an ingenious response to the novel’s polyphony and a tribute to the Scottish language that echoes the tribute Bacharevič pays to the Belarusian tongue.’―New York Review of Books

“Readers will be stirred by Bacharevič’s ardent, earnest devotion.”―Publishers Weekly

‘You can take this book on many levels, from the philosophical and psychological analysis of what it does to a nation and a people to remove, control and suppress its mother tongue, to an exciting tale of two runaway children in a forest trying to survive on blueberries and avoid the threatening adults along their way.’―The Scotsman

‘Kafkaesque and with elements of cyberpunk. Alhierd Bacharevic is the foremost figure of today’s Belarusian literature.’―New Eastern European

‘Bacharevic hits you in the eye with the truth, and it hurts.’―Maria Martysevich

About the Author
 Alhierd Bacharevič grew up in a linguistically-torn country. Despite growing up speaking Russian, Bacharevič rebelled by speaking and writing in Belarusian. In the 1990’s he was the founder and vocalist of the first Belarusian language punk band, Pravakacyja (‘Provocation’).  He is now an award winning author and his works have been translated into French, German, Czech, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian.

Brought up in post-industrial Lanarkshire, Petra Reid did Law at Edinburgh University and worked as a solicitor in general practice, and more recently as a welfare rights adviser. She studied Fine Art while raising a family and developed her interest in poetry through Dada. She does site specific performances at one-off events. She has wandered the east coast of Scotland with a west coast accent for forty years. This is her only qualification for feeding other authors’ works through the mincer of Scots, or at least her version of what may, after all, be a dialect without army or navy. 

Jim Dingley is a respected translator and expert in European languages and studies, with associations with Imperial College London and University College London. He has a lifetime’s worth of experience translating Belarusian into English.