A quiet yet eloquently powerful book on the loss of home through war, about pain and the loss of language. In this moving novel, the author finds a magnificent language of her own
The unusual title ›ë‹ stands for a letter that has an important function in the Albanian language, although it usually goes unpronounced.
As the child of refugees from Kosovo, the narrator is searching for a language and a voice. She grows up in Germany, goes to kindergarten, school and university, looking for understanding, but encountering attributions, incomprehension and ignorance.
When the Kosovo War took place by the end of the 1990s, she experienced it from a safe distance. But war and death are also present in the diaspora – they are just experienced differently.
The novel ›ë‹ tells about the Kosovo war and recalls the suffering of families who lost their homeland, whose murdered relatives were buried anonymously and are still missing or unidentified as of today. Jehona Kicaj brings a past to life that cannot fade because it is permanently embedded in every fibre of the body.