The Time of the Goats Format: Paperback

It’s the late 1940s in Skopje, Yugoslavia, in the critical year leading to Tito’s break with Stalin. Pushed to leave mountain villages to become the new proletariat in urban factories, a flood of peasants crowds into Skopje—and with them, all of their goats. Suffering from hunger, Skopje’s citizens welcome the newcomers. But municipal leaders are faced with a dilemma when the central government issues an order calling for the slaughter of the country’s goat population. With food so scarce, will they hide the outlawed animals? Or will they comply with the edict and endure the bite of hunger?
    The Time of the Goats is the second novel in Luan Starova’s acclaimed multivolume Balkan saga. It follows the main characters from My Father’s Books and the tragicomic events of their lives in Skopje as the narrator’s intellectual father and the head goatherd become friends. As local officials clumsily carry out absurd policies, Starova conveys the bonds of understanding and mutual support that form in Skopje’s poorest neighborhoods. At once historical and allegorical, folkloric and fantastic, The Time of the Goats draws lyrically on Starova’s own childhood.

Luan Starova is a novelist, poet, scholar, diplomat, and literary translator. An Albanian from the Republic of Macedonia who writes in both the Albanian and Macedonian languages, he has served as Macedonia’s ambassador to France, Spain, Portugal, and UNESCO, and was formerly professor of French at the University of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Skopje. His books have been translated into many languages.

Christina E. Kramer is professor and chair of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Toronto. She is coauthor of the 3rd edition of the textbook Macedonian: A Course for Beginning and Intermediate Students, co-translator of the novel Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern Bulgarian, and translator of the first novel in Starova’s Balkan saga: My Father’s Books, all of which are published by the University of Wisconsin Press.