From Albania to Germany, the books of Rene Karabash, from Bulgaria and Christos Asteriou, from Greece blend literary narratives, essays and hard facts.

High in Albania’s Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, a girl escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. She Who Remains is a meditation on womanhood and honor, written almost entirely in a non-linear stream of consciousness. The primary setting is a remote village in the Albanian mountains still ruled by the Kanun. The novel is deliberately ambiguous, possessing fluidity at the line level which underscores the all-at-oneness identity.

The book was written after extensive research on the Kanun - a set of Albanian traditional customary laws, which has directed all the aspects of the Albanian tribal society

Small Empires was written following extensive archival research in Berlin, Manchester, and Jersey. This novella on the historic "Muratti" tobacco company is a book on transience—on all that is destined to disappear with the passage of time. Little Empires proceeds within some unclassifiable genre located at the intersection of testimony, autobiography, and fiction, bringing to mind W.G. Sebald, Eric Vuillard, and Walter Benjamin’s meditation on the ‘angel of history’. In Christos Asteriou’s penetrating existential narrative, human fate is yoked to the movement of history, its dialectic and its cunning.