Melinda Nadj Abonji

Melinda Nadj Abonji was born in Serbia but grew up in Switzerland. The inspiration behind her debut novel Fly Away, Pigeon relies on these two places that Nadj Abonji knows well, as the book charts the heart-wrenching story of a family torn between emigration and immigration and paints evocative portraits of the former Yugoslavia and modern-day Switzerland. Nadj Abonji interweaves two narrative strands, recounting the history of three generations of the Kocsis family and chronicling their hard-won assimilation in Switzerland.

With tough-minded nostalgia and compassionate realism, Fly Away, Pigeon illustrates how much pain and loss even the most successful immigrant stories contain.