Jamilia's husband is off fighting at the front. She spends her days hauling sacks of grain from the threshing floor to the train station in their small village in the Caucasus, accompanied by Seit, her young brother-in-law, and Daniyar, a sullen newcomer to the village who has been wounded on the battlefield. Seit observes the beautiful, spirited Jamilia spurn men's advances, and wince at the dispassionate letters she receives from her husband. Meanwhile, undeterred by Jamilia's teasing, Daniyar sings as they return each evening from the fields. Soon Jamilia is in love, and she and Daniyar elope just as her husband returns.
Publisher: Saqi Books
ISBN: 9781846590320
Number of pages: 96
Weight: 104 g
Dimensions: 200 x 130 x 19 mm
'The most beautiful love story in the world' - Louis Aragon
'An extremely brave, tremblingly vivid and skilful writer - a song that flew against the ideology of the time, showing that life is always bigger and more complicated than any superimposed schemes.' - Hamid Ismailov, author of The Railway
'The novella most vibrantly comes to life is in its evocation of the local landscapes and folk traditions... James Riordan has rendered Aitmatov's prose into simple yet lyrical English' - The Telegraph
'Deftly renders village life in vivid colour' - The Times
'Aitmatov showed the world as he saw it: full of bigotry, prejudice, cruelty, sexism, patriarchal brutality, and general lack of harmony in the way people treat each other. All this is punctuated by beautiful scenes of human kindness, wisdom, love and devotion, set against the background of the stunning central Asian landscape which he poetically evoked.' - Booktrust
'A beautiful love story ... the relationship that grows between Jamilia and co-worker Daniyar, a sullen soldier new to the village who has arrived wounded from the war, is subtle and beautifully developed.' - Bookseller
I don’t really do romance, and a 96-page work of translated fiction from decades past wouldn’t ordinarily float my literary boat, but I took a chance on this little story. How pleased I am that I did.
I was utterly...
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Jamilia: compact, unobtainable, beautiful, resolute, faithful, headstrong. Love has seen her fall to a soldier fighting the just war away from the Caucasian village of their birth. The cannon's mouth may be a few... More
A love story set in Kirghizstan in the second world war. Fascinating insight into traditional kirghiz culture, overlaid with a veneer of communism. Written in Stalinist era so no political comment is made.
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