• Publisher: Beletrina
• 1093 pages
• Author: Lojze Kovačič
• Original title: Prišleki

This three-part autobiographical series begins in 1938 with the expulsion of the Kovačič family from their home in Switzerland and their settlement in the father’s home country of Slovenia, then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It is narrated by a ten-year-old boy, a perennial outsider, a boy who never fits in, either in Switzerland or Slovenia and is viewed with suspicion by adults and peers alike. The work includes haunting, deeply thought-provoking descrip- tions of this isolation as seen through the eyes of the child – in many ways a naïve boy, yet one who was forced to become an adult at an early age.

Newcomers is Kovačič’s central work on the vortex of World War II and the post-war period, covering all the political, ideological and social conflicts of the 20th century and standing as a tragic chronicle of the

recent past. A canonical, extensive and difficult autobiograph- ical work, it is considered a liter ary masterpiece of the 20th century and often compared to the oeuvres of popular modern authors such as Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård, as well as classic authors like Nabokov and Tolstoy.

About the author

Lojze Kovačič

Lojze Kovačič (1928–2004) has established himself as a powerful Slovenian voice in the modern literary canon. His works articulate the limits of the human condition in an introspective and highly philosophical manner, whilst also exploring morality and existential topics such as life and death, displacement and exile, dream

and reality. Although born in Switzerland, Kovačič was exiled to Ljubljana, Slovenia with his German mother and Slovenian father in 1938. As the acclaimed recipient of the Prešeren Award, Slovenia’s highest award for artistic achievement, in 1973 and a three-time winner of the Kresnik Award for best novel of the year in 1991, 2004 and 2016 – the latter being the Silver Kresnik Award – Kovačič was an accomplished author of both children’s and

adult fiction who left behind a

luminescent literary legacy and has been compared to great Central European writers such as Danilo Kiš, Sándor Márai, Imre Kertész and Ismail Kadare.