New month, new book! Anabel has a suggestion for the book you should read in November and this time it's an Albanian novel. "Falled from the sky" by Tom Kuka tells about our Albania, the vicissitudes and brings together the author's fantasy and the real events of the darkest Albanian period.
General information about the book
Albania, 1997. A strange and mysterious shipment of Americans arrives in a haunted Albania. Chaos, fear, crises, kidnappings, will be the background and everyday life that will accompany them while solving a shocking puzzle.
During World War II, an American plane crashes in a lost area of ??Southern Albania and the entire crew disappears without a trace. Fifty years later, a group of Americans, led by an Albanian, wanders among the ravages of 1997, looking for the ghosts of the past. "Falled from the sky" is triggered by a real event, which merges with the author's fantasy to faithfully show Albania on the edge of the abyss.
The novel mercilessly describes a difficult period in Albania's history through a gallery of characters, from street thugs to foreign diplomats. Partisans, nationalists, allies, invaders, State Security, gangs of '97 are mixed together in this book.
Albania is at war, then it goes through peace as if it were a war, and finally it enters the war again.
"Fallen from the sky" finally brings Tom Cook back to the present day, although the writer himself has a heart for wandering in the secrets of the old times, talking with the dead and haunting legends.
This book is based on the true story of Romeo Zegal. However, "Falled from the Sky" is a fiction of the author, so matching any characters with real people is purely coincidental.
2 words about the author
"Falled from the sky" is the sixth novel of the writer who writes under the pseudonym Tom Kuka. Publications Pegi has published "Hide on the cobblestones" (2017), "Stones of loneliness" (2018), "Ora e liga" (2019), "Flama" (2021), and "Encirclement" (2022). Tom Kuka is the winner of the "Best Novel of the Year" award given by the Ministry of Culture in 2018, for the novel "Stones of Solitude". Also, in 2021, the novel "Flama" was awarded the European Prize for Literature. His novels have been published in Italy, Germany, Serbia and Bulgaria.
Some excerpts from the book:
1) "People burned, they put bridges of fire on everything that caught fire. They took fire wherever they could, wherever there were papers, sheets, written pages, books, magazines, registers, notes, letters. People live with memories , except for Albanians who don't want to remember, so they had a great desire to turn everything into dust and ashes. The letters were to blame, because if you wrote them once, they would remain like this forever to never stop remembering, never, so they found them hidden in baskets, plants, attics, under windows, piled up in schools, prisons, nurseries and turned them into ashes."
2) "They burned what came in front of them, mortgages, confessions to the investigator, evidence of births, marriages, separations, properties lost or acquired by court, securities, sheets with reports of fuksas, badly written stories, memories of wise men, rhapsodic verses, secret bastard child cards, death lists, morgue autopsies, doctors' notes, fortune tellers, devil bottle songs, brandy roasting rituals, meat smoking recipes , how zahirets are made, the ways of crocheting lace, events narrated by once beautiful women, nightmares of summer nights of not beautiful girls, late-night Karaman poems, holy books, manuals, ordinances, spelling rules, church canons, fatwas of the mosque, accounts of the shearers, diaries of the butchers, scraps of thoughts of the keepers of the chicken coops, odes without rhymes of the age of puberty, curses of peasants, mothers of sorcerers..."
3) "Hetem Myzeqari took a rake, scratched the ground, where it had been standing for years and it fell from the sky. In a matter of days, the violets would bloom on it. Only in that two palm area would they sprout. He plucked them before they withered, because the dead man, whom he knew only as a corpse, is in pain. The memories are placed in the center of the stone-paved courtyard.
