Mothers and Truckers
translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood
June 2022
220 pages, paperback
ISBN 978-1-914990-11-3
Mothers and Truckers is a collection of five stories by the Slovak writer Ivana Dobrakovová, set in her hometown of Bratislava, and in Turin, Italy, where she now lives. Each of the stories features a troubled young woman living through, or reliving, a variety of traumatic events, and Dobrakovová has given each a distinct voice in which they deliver cascading internal monologues that are intense, searingly honest, and often very funny. The protagonists struggle to shake off the influence of dominant mothers and to escape from claustrophobic relationships with neglectful husbands or partners, or to process the trauma of a father’s mental decline and descent into alcoholism, or they seek solace in imaginary relationships with distant truck drivers.
Read an excerpt from the story “Father,” from Mothers and Truckers, in Asymptote
More About This Title in the Press
- “The Ties That Bind and Confine: Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrakovová” by Joseph Schreiber on roughghosts, June 2023
- “Disparate and Distressed Dames” by Anna West in Apofenie, November 2022
- Watch a bilingual reading from Mothers and Truckers by Ivana Dobrakovová and Julia Sherwood on TranslatorsAloud