Day in Day Out — Terezia Mora

In a scruffy park of a West European metropolis, a man in an ill-fitting trench coat is found hanging by the feet, half-dead.

This is Abel Nema, the enigmatic yet fascinating protagonist of Terezia Mora's internationally acclaimed novel, a linguistic phenomenon who can speak ten languages flawlessly but whose grip on reality is slowly slipping away. Since his self-imposed exile from his Balkan homeland ten years earlier, he has been making a life among fellow refugees: a group of bohemian jazz musicians, an eccentric student of ancient history, and a gang of young Gypsies. His acquaintances among the locals include a neighbor who claims to have visited heaven (and introduces Abel to hallucinogens), the sordid characters who frequent the neighborhood sex bar, and a wonderfully zany family he joins when, desperate to extend his residency permit, he enters into a fictive marriage. Yet through it all he remains strangely hollow: for all his languages he has little humanity to put into words.