The Path of the Eels

This multi-volume Balkan saga traces the author’s family line from the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century to the collapse of Yugoslavia at the close of that century, crossing borders, identities, languages, religions, and genres. The novel explores the nature of boundaries through the metaphor of an eel, a fish that has for centuries crossed human-imposed borders in its migratory journey from its adopted home in the Balkans to its birthplace in the Sargasso Sea.

Luan Starova is an Albanian-Macedonian writer and translator whose work provides new understandings of the Balkans, a region known in the West more for discord than discussion. A former professor of French literature and a member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences, he is the author of more than eighteen works, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He lives in the Republic of Macedonia. Christina E. Kramer is a professor of Slavic and Balkan languages and linguistics. She is the author of the language textbook Macedonian: A Course for Beginning and Intermediate Students and the translator of Balkan Saga, Freud’s Sister, My Father’s Books, A Spare Life, and The Time of the Goats. She lives in Toronto.