Havra
About the book
Historical Fiction / Literary Thriller · Dual Timeline · 229,000 words
Complete English translation available
After his father’s suspicious death in a fire, Nikola Markov returns from California to Bulgaria. While investigating a possible murder and negotiating the sale of family land, he helps eighty-five-year-old Vera translate an 1878 memoir. The document tells the story of her great-aunt Vera Elegina and American war correspondent John (Januarius) MacGahan, whose reports on the 1876 April Uprising helped ignite the Russo-Turkish War. The historical and the contemporary stories intertwine in unexpected ways as Nikola searches for the truth about his father’s death and his own redemption.
Moving across continents and generations, from late nineteenth-century Russia and the Ottoman Empire through Central Asia and England to post-totalitarian Bulgaria and the United States, Havra is an epic historical novel told within the framework of a literary thriller. It is a novel about memory, freedom, exile, and the forces that shape both private lives and national destinies.
Editions and facts
- Ciela, 2017.
- Complete English translation available.
- Six-part television adaptation: in production, co-written by Zachary Karabashliev.
Reviews
In Havra, Zachary Karabashliev interweaves a gorgeously fictionalized story of Januarius MacGahan, a late 19th-century American war correspondent crucial to Bulgaria’s liberation from the Ottoman Empire, with a painfully realistic pulp fiction tale of 20th-century mafia war after the fall of socialism. With a fresh balance of wit, vulnerability, and fast-paced action, this novel illustrates how the dormant seeds of the past have sown the barren fields of our political and personal present.