Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow

“A novel of searing originality, of magical depths and heights. Its characters and insights into history and human nature have stayed with me indelibly over the years and accompanied me like a waking dream.” —Kapka Kassabova

“Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow is an awesome book, an epic travelogue across times and cultures that have shaped a national history. Iana Boukova is a veritable language artist whose novel reads like a giant, seamless prose poem. Ekaterina Petrova’s translation recreates—quite miraculously and breathtakingly—the music and the matter of Boukova’s language, the complex cadences of her operatic sentences, their original rhythms and acoustic reverberations.Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow is a major event in international literature.” —Aron Aji

“Masterful, a dazzling feat of mythmaking, told in sentences that come down like gorgeous hammers. lana Boukova’s elemental, cradle-to-grave Balkan stories—stories about storytelling itself—brim with history, folklore, fate, and the primordial. Ekaterina Petrova’s translation brilliantly carries Boukova’s singular voice into an English that’s carnal, incantatory, and more than a little dangerous.“—Izidora Angel

”Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow is one of the most important, valuable, and beautiful contemporary Bulgarian novels.“—Mitko Novkov

“We are simultaneously the spiderweb and the spider, Boukova’s poetic work seems to indicate, with its continuous engendering of connections. It transforms the trivial and self-evident, adds itself to the mystery without solving it, aware that it is a part of it, expounding an unrelenting logic.“—Katerina lliopoulou

“In inviting us to decipher the complex patterns connecting the lives she describes, while scrupulously avoiding total clarity, Boukova constructs her novel as a tantalising puzzle. For those up to the challenge, this is well worth a read.” —Priya Abularach, Literary Review (UK)

“Set in the Balkans during the 19th century, the novel’s eight sections tell the life stories of eight characters in intricately rhythmical, serpentine prose.” —Bela Shayevich, N+1

“Eight years in the making, Ekaterina Petrova’s translation preserves the novel’s ballad-like cadence and shifting registers, the precise strangeness of its images, the headlong energy of its long sentences … Lyrical, macabre, erudite, and at times even slyly comic, it describes a world in which people step into each other’s shadows and vanish—but the stories continue, seeking new bodies and readers to inhabit them.” —Rosalia Ignatova, Asymptote

“A delightful book about the nestled mythologies of storytelling … Iana Boukova’s prose offers blistering beauty and a net of history that is sure to entangle readers.“—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

Iana Boukova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1968. She is the author of two short-story collections and five books of poetry, most recently Black Haiku. Her poetry collection Notes of the Phantom Woman, which received the prestigious Ivan Nikolov National Poetry Award, was published in English by Ugly Duckling Presse. Boukova has a degree in classics and has translated into Bulgarian Sappho’s fragments, the collected poetry of Catullus, and Pindar’s Pythian Odes. She lives between Sofia and Athens.

Ekaterina Petrova holds an MFA in Literary Translation from the University of Iowa, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. Her writings and translations have appeared in Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Modern Poetry in Translation, EuropeNow, Reading in Translation, European Literature Network, Exchanges, and elsewhere. Her translation of Iana Boukova’s Notes of the Phantom Woman (co-translated with John O’Kane from the Greek) was published in 2024. She lives in Sofia.

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