Published in 2017
136 pages
Nataliya Deleva is a Bulgarian-born writer, living in London. Her debut novel, Four Minutes, was originally published in Bulgaria (2017), where the book was awarded Best Debut Novel and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year (2018). It has since been translated into German (2018), English (2021) and Polish (2021).
Her short fiction, essays, interviews and book reviews have appeared in literary journals and anthologies, such as Words Without Borders, Fence, Asymptote, Empty Mirror, Reading in Translation, Granta and the anthologies Stories from the 90s (2019) and Love for advanced (2022).
What is this book about?
Giving voice to people living on the periphery in post-communist Bulgaria, Four Minutes centers around Leah, an orphan who suffered daily horrors growing up, and now struggles to integrate into society as a gay woman. She confronts her trauma by trying to volunteer at the orphanage, and to adopt a young girl—a choice that is frustrated over and over by bureaucracy and the pervasive stigma against gay women.
In addition to Leah’s narrative, the novel contains nine other standalone character studies of other frequently ignored voices. These sections are each meant to be read in approximately four minutes, a nod to a social experiment that put forth the hypothesis that it only takes four minutes of looking someone in the eye and listening to them in order to accept and empathize with them.
A meticulously crafted social novel, Four Minutes takes a difficult, uncompromising look at modern life in Eastern Europe.
