Every Time We Say Goodbye

'… every departure is a little death, every departure always clings to what it leaves behind, and every one deserves its own photo, its own legend …'

A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin by a gesture of violence. As the wheels turn, his mind roams free in a feverish attempt to trace the genealogy of that violence in his own past and that of Europe as a whole. A man in search of a destination where he can be a stranger – but has that better place since ceased to exist?

Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family divided 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.



A profound novel of contemporary Europe in the stark and furious voice of Dublin Prize-shortlisted Ivana Sajko, powerfully translated by Mima Simić.



Ivana Sajko, born in Zagreb in 1975, is a writer, theatre director and performer, working in the overlapping fields of literature, performance art and music. She is an author of four highly-praised novels and dozens of political theatre pieces, among which Woman-bomb gained international success.