Guarding Hanna
by Miha Mazzini
- original title: Telesni čuvaj
- fiction/novel
- first published in 2001
- 333 pages
- sold to US (Scala House Press, North Atlantic Books)
- represented by Sanje
He was born a freak. With above-average intelligence, which soon realises that a body bent on destruction cannot live among others. The only person who can help him is a Mafia don, who has enough money to isolate the monster. But nothing comes free. And now, the moment when the freak has to repay the favour has arrived. He has to come out of isolation and become a bodyguard of a woman named Hanna for a week.
A darkly comic thriller of a modern Beauty and the Beast story gone terribly wrong ??
Guarding Hanna was nominated for the 2003 IMPAC award. A new US edition is to appear at North Atlantic Books/Random House in June 2008.
Thouroughly unique black comedy ?? delightfully perverse and oddly touching story.
Publishers Weekly, 2002
?? the weird, elegant story of a conspicuously hairy, snout-nosed bodyguard predisposed to fits of violence and self-reflection. Much of the action takes place in the confines of Hanna’s Berlin appartment (she’s the witness our nameless deformed hero has been hired to protect). Amidst the taut chronicle of their week together ?? Hanna is chatty while the bodyguard remains taciturn; she brews herb tea while he inadvertently kills intruders ?? certain truths arise ?? And finally: here’s one bodyguard who may not have been hired for the right reasons.
the Journal News, 2003