Archipelago Books 2027

Shortlisted for the Austrian Book Prize 2023

A novel about moving out for the last time, about silent family bonds, about regret and forgiveness

As Mira gets into the car to drive from the big city to her small hometown in the countryside, she knows that the next few days will be tough. She has to help her elderly mother to prepare to move out of the house where she had found shelter decades ago together with her small children. In a family whose members don’t speak to each other and don’t show their emotions, it is left to Mira to break the news to her mother that she has to move into a home for the elderly because her nephew needs the house. Over the course of the following weeks, memories of a traumatic childhood return and solidify, both for Mira and for her mother; two childhoods burdened by poverty, death, oppression, and the rigid patriarchal order of rural Carinthia, on the Austrian border with Slovenia. Unresolved conflicts come to the surface, and Mira begins to see similarities between her own life and her mother’s, stirring up memories of their female ancestors, who made diametrically opposed decisions to face the difficulties of surviving during the war.

In her new novel, Maja Haderlap tells in haunting images of being entangled in imposed and internalized societal roles and of the struggle for autonomy. The story of Shadow Women is one of loss, silence, and guilt, in which, despite everything, understanding and respect for one another, perhaps even love, are never abandoned.

»... a dense, impressive book.«
Christoph Schröder, Süddeutsche Zeitung

»Shadow Women is a deeply moving novel of great poetic force.«
Jury of the Austrian Book Prize 2023

»Maja Haderlap’s work represents a kind of literature that accepts no boundaries. Her poetry discovers behind every word another word, reveals a plaint behind every silence and finds a deed behind every secret.« Jury of the Max Frisch-Preis 2018

»A text about defeat and rebellion, about the possibilities of failure and success in the face of destructive historical forces. Above all, though, it is also a novel about the fact that any notion of homogeneous identity is ultimately an ideological straitjacket that suffocates not just the present, but also the future.« Kulturmontag, ORF2