Every Time We Say Goodbye

A soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition and failure--Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads.

A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin. As the wheels turn, his mind feverishly clacks along, tracing his own past--and that of Europe--to a moment of violence he must flee, moving him further and farther away from the one person he loves.

Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family separated by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin--yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. Every Time We Say Goodbye is an extended soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition, and failure, and is a profoundly stark and furious novel.

Ivana Sajko is a writer, theatre director, and performer working in the overlapping fields of literature, performance art and music. The author of four acclaimed novels and dozens of political theatre pieces, among which Woman-bomb gained international success, she is the four-time winner of a national playwriting award as well as the French Chevalier Medal of Arts and Letters, the Ivan Goran Kovačic Prize for best debut novel, and Internationales Literaturpreis. A contributor to Die Zeit, she lives in Berlin with her son.

Mima Simic is a writer, film critic, translator, and LGBTIQ+ activist. She holds degrees in comparative literature, English language and literature, and gender studies, and was Croatia’s first openly LGBTIQ+ political candidate.