Power and Resistance

Sample translation available

Ilija Trojanow has written the book of his life: A dizzying stare into the abyss between power and resistance.

Konstantin is a fighter in the resistance, on the run but never far out of reach of the Bulgarian Secret Police. Metodi is an officer, an opportunist and careerist, a true representative of the state. The two are locked in a struggle for life and memory, a struggle that will last half a century.

Ilija Trojanow unfolds a historical panorama that is staggering in its exemplary truthfulness. He condenses a wealth of individual moments of lived experience – collected since the 1990s in conversations with historical witnesses – into a thrilling tale of fate and of human dignity and depravity. Power and Resistance is a moving effort to preserve memory; a novel whose decisiveness and poetic power have rarely been equalled.

"This is documentary prose that has great artistic value." - Welt am Sonntag, Samuel Finzi