Water, Spiderweb

The 1964 Sava River flood sets in motion this literary thriller and then sweeps away everything before it.

With Water, Spiderweb Nada Gasic cements her reputation as both a spellbinding author and a remarkable chronicler of the city she calls home: Zagreb, Croatia. An eccentric cast of marginalized characters, from a mentally ill man who channels the Virgin Mary to three sisters cast from a disfigured version of the Cinderella fairy tale, this novel is not so much about crimes committed but rather the questions around why these crimes are committed, on an individual level and on a societal level.

In piecing together the clues that may or may not answer these questions, Gasic makes clear that we are the ones responsible for the circumstances that yield the deaths of the innocent.

After a prominent career as an editor, at the age of 57, Nada Gasic published her first novel, Mirna ulica, drvored, for which she was awarded the Slavic Prize for best debut novel, and in 2010 she published the novel Voda, Paucina (Water, Spiderweb), which was awarded the City of Zagreb Prize and the Vladimir Nazor Prize.

Ellen Elias-Bursac has been translating novels and nonfiction by Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian writers since the 1980s, including Dasa Drndic, Dubravka Ugresic, Ivana Bodrozic, and Robert Perisic. Her translation of David Albahari’s novel Götz and Meyer won the National Translation Award, given by the American Literary Translators Association, in 2006. A past president of the American Literary Translators Association, she has taught at the Harvard Slavic Department and Tufts University, and spent over six years at the ex-Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague as a translator.