Dry Season (Paperback)

With a global perspective, Babnik takes on the themes of racism, the role of women in modern society and the loneliness of the human condition. Dry Season is a record of an unusual love affair. Anna is a 62-year-old designer from Slovenia and Ismael, a 27-year-old man from Burkino Faso who has grownup on the street, often the victim of abuse. What unites them is the loneliness of their bodies, a tragic childhood and the hamartan dry season, during which neither nature nor love is able to flourish. Anna soon realizes that the emptiness between them is not really caused by their skin colour and age difference, but predominantly by her belonging to the Western culture in which she has lost or abandoned all the preordained roles of daughter, wife and mother. Sex does not outstrip the loneliness and repressed secrets from the past surface into a world she relsies ismuch crueller than she thought and, at the same time, more innocent than her own. Cleverly written as an alternating narrative of both sides in the relationship, the novel is interlaced with magic realism.