Four Minutes - by Nataliya Deleva (Paperback)

About the Book

"Giving voice to people living on the periphery in post-communist Bulgaria, Four Minutes centers around Leah, an orphan who suffered daily horrors growing up, and now struggles to integrate into society as a gay woman. She confronts her trauma by trying to volunteer at the orphanage, and to adopt a young girl--a choice that is frustrated over and over by bureaucracy and the pervasive stigma against gay women. In addition to Leah's narrative, the novel contains nine other standalone character studies of other frequently ignored voices. These sections are each meant to be read in approximately four minutes, a nod to a social experiment that put forth the hypothesis that it only takes four minutes of looking someone in the eye and listening to them in order to accept and empathize with them. A meticulously crafted social novel, Four Minutes takes a difficult, uncompromising look at modern life in Eastern Europe."--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Giving voice to people living on the periphery in post-communist Bulgaria, Four Minutes centers around Leah, an orphan who suffered daily horrors growing up, and now struggles to integrate into society as a gay woman. She confronts her trauma by trying to volunteer at the orphanage, and to adopt a young girl--a choice that is frustrated over and over by bureaucracy and the pervasive stigma against gay women.

In addition to Leah's narrative, the novel contains nine other standalone character studies of other frequently ignored voices. These sections are each meant to be read in approximately four minutes, a nod to a social experiment that put forth the hypothesis that it only takes four minutes of looking someone in the eye and listening to them in order to accept and empathize with them.

A meticulously crafted social novel, Four Minutes takes a difficult, uncompromising look at modern life in Eastern Europe.

Review Quotes

"A beautiful, intricately woven, and exciting book."--Wioletta Greg, author of Swallowing Mercury

"Four Minutes is a novel about people on the margins of society. Different storylines interlace in order to tell one story: about the invisibility. This is a book that grabs you by the throat, a poignant novel."--Georgi Gospodinov, author of The Physics of Sorrow

"Few are capable of reproducing, without even a slight trace of pretension, the lives of those who have lived in care homes for abandoned children, especially during the post-communist transition period, and their subsequent fates. In fact, generally speaking, each of us is an abandoned child, however those who the author depicts, really are invisible on the social map. Nataliya Deleva removes from their faces all the clichés that we're so used to trashing at them. A difficult, poignant, important, really important book."--Marin Bodakov, Culture Newspaper

"Four Minutes by Nataliya Deleva is [. . .] a powerful, captivating, fascinating book! A reader would never be the same, after allowing the narrative to pass through them."--Bella Cholakova, AzCheta.com