Book launch: Jonah and His Daughter

Jonah and His Daughter is the Romanian author Ioana Pârvulescu's latest book to be published in English. It offers us an affectionate and vivid account of the reluctant prophet Jonah, passed down from mother to daughter over the course of thousands of years, from the eighth century B.C. to the present day.

In a sweeping narrative that pans out from the ancient port of Jaffa in the eastern Mediterranean to the modern-day cities of Prague, Munich, London and Bucharest, the first storyteller we meet is Jonah’s daughter herself, and the last is a proud mother of twins in our own time.

A colourful, varied tapestry of tales within tales that interweaves myth, legend, family histories, and psychologies, the novel expands on a familiar Biblical story to explore permanence and change, on the unfolding of self through storytelling, and the mystery of the narrated self.

The event is organised together with Istros Books and the Romanian Cultural Institute.