Culture, religion, and ideology collide in the mountains of Bulgaria in this big hearted debut novelStork Mountain tells the story of a young Bulgarian immigrant who, in an attempt to escape his mediocre life in America, returns to the country of his birth. Retracing the steps of his estranged grandfather, a man who suddenly and inexplicably cut all contact with the family three years prior, the boy finds himself on the border of Bulgaria and Turkey, a ston...

In his mesmerising first novel, the internationally celebrated short-story writer Miroslav Penkov spins the intriguing tale of an American student who returns to Bulgaria, the country he left as a child. His mission is to track down his grandfather and to find out why he suddenly cut off all contact with the family three years before.The trail leads him to a remote village on the border with Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains - a place of pa...

A grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov's strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his charming, deeply felt debut collection. In EAST OF THE WEST, Penkov writes wit...

A grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov's strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his beguiling and deeply felt debut.In East of the West, Penkov wr...

A grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov's strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his charming, deeply felt debut collection.In EAST OF THE WEST, Penkov wri...

In Stork Mountain, a young Bulgarian immigrant returns to the country of his birth in search of his grandfather, who suddenly and unexpectedly cut off all contact with the family three years ago. The trail leads him to a village on the border with Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains—a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across...

Featuring: LUCY CALDWELL, JULIAN GOUGH, M.J. HYLAND, KRYS LEE, DEBORAH LEVY, MIROSLAV PENKOV (WINNER), HENRIETTA ROSE-INNES (RUNNER UP), ADAM ROSS, CARRIE TIFFANY, CHRIS WOMERSLEY"I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter," quipped Blaise Pascal famously, "I didn’t have time to write you a short one."Brevity may be the soul of wit, but as Clive Anderson argues in his introduction to this collection, it is also, very often, the hard-won soul of great literatu...