Monumenta

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

Olga Pavic's house has been requisitioned.
The council will bulldoze it.
Her home will become a monument to a massacre.

But Olga cannot ascertain which massacre. Three different architects visit, each with a proposal to construct a different monument, to memorialise a different horror.

Olga can't allow them to unearth the secrets held in this space, not until she reunites with her children for a final dinner. Her aspirational, distant daughter, Hilde, and her secretly queer son, Danilo, both reluctantly agree to fly back to Belgrade.

Within an atmosphere of razor-sharp political surreality, Lara Haworth spins a tender, magical story of familial love and loss. Via a panoply of perspectives Monumenta compellingly and playfully explores remembrance and how tragedy can be the catalyst for remarkable transformation.

Reviews

Absurdist and humane, this is a laser-sharp work of concentrated brilliance. Encompassing family and history, politics and love, Monumenta is surprising, original and so assured -- WENDY ERSKINE
A deeply political debut novel, fizzing with ideas, examines the difficulties of memorialising the past in a region riven by conflict * * Observer * *
Beneath the whimsy lurk serious issues about statues, official histories and which parts of our past we seek to paper over * * Financial Times * *
Surreal, quirky, playful and serious . . . This slip of a book takes us to contemporary Belgrade and explores, with imagination and dark humour, how painful pasts are dealt with personally and publicly, asking questions about the roles of memorialisation, memory, erasure, transformation, grief and healing -- PRISCILLA MORRIS
Every image is charged with meaning; every word bears the weight of history. Hallucinatory, haunting . . . Lara Haworth is an important new voice in European literature -- CLARE POLLARD
A gem of genuine absurdism, and one that moves so unpredictably along its own structure, touching on - banging on, and knocking down - the fundamentals of buildings and trauma, family and love, reason and history, in a stunning, witty kick of literary brilliance -- HOLLY PESTER
The satire in Monumenta is loaded without ever feeling overegged because there is so much substance here, so many layers of characterisation and theme running through such a short book that are expressed in some exquisite writing * * New European * *
A haunting read about all manner of love and loss, remembering and forgetting. I could not put it down -- KIRSTY WARK
Monumenta is . . . a very apt book, it fits right here, meaning now and I read it in one sitting. This is a party I'm glad I was invited to -- EILEEN MYLES
Full of fresh and witty descriptions, featuring incisively drawn characters, about personal and political memory, and how each wrestles with the other. About how the past nourishes yet also throttles the present. About the impossibility of escape from either one's history or one's destiny -- TIM PEARS

Author Bio

Lara Haworth is a writer, filmmaker and a political researcher, specialising in the UK's move to become carbon zero by 2050. Having turned an extract from Monumenta into a short story, she won a Bridport prize for it in October 2022. In the same year she won a prize for her poem 'The Thames Barrier' in the Caf Writers Poetry Competition, wrote and narrated a podcast, The Swimming Pool, for NTS radio and was commissioned to write a long autofiction feature, Mistakes are Pure Colour, for Extra Extra Magazine. Her writing workshop, Letters That Will Never Be Sent, was featured in a BBC World Service documentary. Her film, All the People I Hurt With My Wedding, won the LGBT prize at the Athens International Monthly Film Festival, and her latest film, Grief is a Hungry Ghost, has premiered at festivals including Japan International, New York Tri-State and Munich New Wave. Monumenta is her first novel.

larahaworth.com | @larahaworth | @lara_haworth