Every Time We Say Goodbye
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Mar 3, 2026
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- $9.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unnamed narrator of this intense and recursive work from Sajko unfurls an angst-fueled account of his train trip from Croatia to Berlin. He has left in a rush, driven by emotional turmoil over the deaths of his violent father and self-involved mother, as well as a recent breakup with his girlfriend. His memories are vivid, and as the train makes its way up the coast, he circles through fond recollections of his grandmother, who lived in a rustic village and doted on him, and memories of his confusion as a teen during the Balkan Wars. A journalist by trade, he's chronically afflicted with writer's block, and fancies himself a modern-day Baudelaire. He peppers the narrative with cultural references, from Jean Genet's theories about war photography (the narrator agrees with Genet that "a photograph's precision doesn't make you a witness") to Pearl Jam, remembering how their song about a classroom suicide played years earlier during a nightclub shooting. The sluggish train suffers multiple delays and route changes, a perfect metaphor for the narrator's aimlessness and anxiety, "meandering and circling around what hurts the most and yet cannot be changed as it shrinks into nothingness behind me." Sajko's blackhearted modernist novel is worth a look.
