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Five Fingers (excerpt)
Māra Zālīte
Māra Zālīte was born in
1952
in
Krasnoyarsk,
Siberia, where her family
had been deported by the
Soviet regime. When she
was four years old, they returned to Latvia. In 1975 she
graduated from the Department of Philology of the
University of Latvia. She has led the Young Writers’ Studio,
been editor-in-chief of the literary magazine
Karogs
, and
headed the copyright agency of Latvia. She is the author of
five poetry books and 21 staged plays and musicals,
including several rock librettos, as well as children’s books
and collections of essays. She was in the forefront of Latvian
intellectuals during the so-called Singing Revolution, and
continues to have a prominent voice in current events.
Five Fingers
is her first novel, treating of the period her
family returned to her grandfather’s farm in Latvia, where
she had to reconcile the life she found there compared with
the distant fairyland Latvia she had heard about in Siberia.
This work debuts in English in our pages.
Translated from Latvian by Margita Gailitis; edited by Vija
Kostoff.