The Ministry of Pain

Tanja Lucic teaches at the University of Amsterdam and lives on the edge of the city's red light district. She and her pupils, fleeing the violent break-up of their homeland Yugoslavia, have found temporary refuge in the Department of Slavonic Languages. Desperate to make ends meet, many of the students find work at the 'Ministry', a fetish-wear factory in North Amsterdam. Meanwhile, Tanja and her student Igor form a dangerously close relationship that threatens to unleash all the tensions of life in exile. With her sharp and melancholy observations, Dubravka Ugresic illuminates with savage compassion our shared human homelessness.

Author Biography

Dubravka Ugresic has been compared favourably with writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf, and is the recipient of many literary prizes. She entered self-imposed exile when Croatia's late president, Franjo Tudjman, proclaimed Croatia to be 'paradise on earth' in the early 1990s. Other publications include Nobody's Home