The New Job and The Owl (+SVIZRA 2)

Book 2 of Strangers Press' chapbook series, +SVIZRA.

In ‘The New Job’, a naive and hopeful young girl crosses the border into German-speaking Switzerland for a job as an au-pair in a family that may be more sinister than it at first seems. 

In ‘The Owl’, an elderly lady rummages through her memory to work out what made her daughter so painfully distant. These stories, selected from Anna Ruchat’s Swiss Literature Prize-winning collection Gli anni di Nettuno sulla terra (Neptune’s Years on Earth), detail seemingly ordinary episodes in the lives of her characters and through them fascinatingly unravel decades of complex feelings and relationships. They float lightly upon the ebbs and flows of female relationships and leave the reader pondering what-could-have-beens versus what, inevitably, was.

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+SVIZRA is a series of eight playfully designed chapbooks published as an exciting showcase of contemporary writing from the four official languages of Switzerland: German, French, Italian and Romansh. It takes its name from the Romansh name for ‘Switzerland’ and is the result of our latest collaboration with an international group of authors, translators, publishers, designers and editors.

In publishing them, along with other sets on the way, we are continuing our mission to broaden the appreciation and breadth in the UK of contemporary European writing in particular and international literature in general against a still rising political tide of mutual suspicion, intolerance and aggression.

In giving equal visibility and weight to each of the four languages, +SVIZRA offers a range of Swiss writing never before seen in English from a diverse group of some of the best authors living and working in Switzerland today, including National Literature Prize winning Anna Ruchat, Iraqi exile Usama Al-Shahmani, and Romansh author, Rut Plouda.