Away! Away!

Sometimes running away is the bravest option. Or, so believes Rosa, who ditches her husband and home and takes off on the road. Along the way, she encounters the owner of a puppet theater who’s on a mission to conquer the world with his performance of "The Snow Queen."

Which character from this old fairy tale will Rosa identify with? With Gerda, searching fruitlessly for her lost love? With Kai, who flees home and his beloved one day without a word? Or with the Snow Queen, who seems to stand aloof above it all?

With magnetic, sparkling prose, Benová delivers a lively mosaic that ruminates on human relationships, our greatest fears and desires.

Jana Benova is one of the most acclaimed Slovak authors, and winner of the European Union Prize for Literature. She is a poet and novelist, author of the novels Seeing People Off, Away! Away!, Parker, and Honeymoon, as well as three collections of poems. Though her work has been widely translated throughout Europe, Seeing People Off was her first book to be translated to English.

Janet Livingstone was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and ventured to Czechoslovakia just after the 1989 Velvet Revolution. In total, she spent 15 years in Bratislava in Slovakia. In 2003, she began translating films and plays from Slovak to English and hasn’t looked back since. Among her full-length book translations are Master your Stage Fright by Slovak master violinist, Bohdan Warchal and Piata lod (working title: Boat Number Five) by novelist Monika Kompanikova. In addition to Jana Benova, her current translation projects include the novels The Best of All Worlds by Slovak-Swiss author Irena Bre?na and The Arab World—Another Planet? by Emire Khidayer. Janet lives in Seattle with her two children and also speaks French, Italian, Russian, Spanish and elementary Japanese to anyone who will listen.