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, recalcitrant 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, variegated tapestry of tales within tales that inter- weaves myth, legend, family histories, and psychologies, the novel expands upon a familiar Biblical story in order to meditate on permanence and change, on the unfolding of self through storytelling, and the irreducible mystery of the narrated self.
Ioana Pârvulescu is a writer, professor and translator from French and German. She has published several bestselling essay collections about everyday life in the 19th century, the interbellum period of the 20th century, and during communism, along with five well-received novels: Viața începe vineri (Life Begins on Friday, 2009), Viitorul începe luni (The Future Begins on Monday, 2012), Inocenții (The Innocents, 2016), Prevestirea (Jonah and His Daughter, 2020) and her latest, Aurul pisicii (Cat-Gold, 2024).
George Stanica worked as a radio producer, presenter, and correspondent with the BBC World Service in London. He taught and translated English, American, and German literature, aesthetics, and philosophy. His literary articles have been published or broadcast in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Romania. He has a BA in English, American, and German literature and wrote a dissertation on Saul Bellow. At present, he is a freelance translator and writer/journalist in the UK.
The event is organised together with Istros Books and the Romanian Cultural Institute.
