The Lack of Light: A Novel of Georgia

In this sweeping platonic love story, four female friends first meet as grade schoolers in a Tblisi apartment courtyard in the late 1980s. In alternating timelines, we see how these women’s lives tangle with and are impacted by their home city and its political upheaval, invasions and civil war, and violence of organized crime over the course of twenty years. This was a hard read—both challenging to me as a reader and utterly heartbreaking—but my time here was well spent. Translated from the original German by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin.