Joanna Elmy’s debut novel, Born to Guilt is a very powerful and heartrending novel about the intense bond between mother and child and the consequence of freedom.

“I am calm only when alone. That’s what my mother used to say. As a child I hated her for this because it meant I should not have existed. Now I’m frightened by how much I understand her.” 

Twenty-year-old Yana spends her days in a series of dead-end service jobs and her nights meeting other immigrants after moving from post-communist Bulgaria to the US failing to ease her hardship.  Newly arrived in America she breathes easier amidst the chaos of this bright new world, but her thoughts keep returning to her family and the country she left behind. She dreams that as she’s checking in for her flight from Sofia, the luggage scale jumps from 30kg to 5000kg. When the ticketing agent opens the suitcase for inspection, she starts to pull out Yana’s family members, one by one. It’s an evocative image to represent the weight of all we carry.  Yana lands in a Delaware resort whose economy relies heavily on seasonal workers. She cobbles together “Shit-work” jobs in food service and shares cheap accommodation on the outskirts of town. One night, Yana witnesses an young Moldovan woman fatally struck by a car while biking home on the highway late at night. The novel opens as Donald Trump campaigns in the 2016 presidential election. Yana’s first-person account is woven together with third-person flashbacks to her childhood, as well as the stories of her mother, Eva. Elmy born in Sofia in 1995 into what she describes in the novel as “world of deficits”. Emly follows three women weathering violent marriages, political collapse, and the ghosts of their pasts revaling what is really means to survive. Blood is thicker than both water and alcohol; of love connection, roots, of longing for home, despite everything, of personal growth and reconciliation.

Working as a doctor in Bulgaria haunted by communism, Yana’s beautiful mother Lily believes she has escaped the dark horrors of her childhood, until she finds herself trapped once more in a violent marriage.

Lily’s own mother, Eva is slowly losing herself in the embroidery of her memories. She urges Yana not to make the same mistakes she and Lily did- not to do everything her family tells her.

Joanna Elmy following three women weathering violent marriages, political collapse, and the ghosts of their pasts, Born of Guilt delivers a tenacious, exploration of what it truly means to survive. Bulgaria faced economic collapse, a banking crisis and hyperinflation. Though Yana’s parents are doctors, they struggle to get by- unable to afford nappies and constantly hungry, eating popara, bread dipped in tea. “Both of them wonder why everything wasn’t fixed after 1989, like they believed it would. Why is tomorrow’s world is empty as yesterday’s…

Yana’s father battles with alcohol addiction, becoming violent when he’s drunk. He and Lily eventually divorce, and he disappears from Yana’s life. Eva’s husband was also brutally abusive. 

If Communism was a failed experiment, capitalism doesn’t come up roses, either. When Yana decides to overstay her J-1 visa, she struggles to find housing and is relegated to under-the-table work. She wonders if “how nice it is here in the West” wasn’t “just a mirage (our parents) glimpsed from behind their Iron curtains.”

In the communities she is dispatched to clean, the residents “are protected from all the places where the others are, where the American dream writhes in agony”.

It’s not just immigrants who are losing faith in the illusion, as Yana strikes up a friendship with an older waiter- the only American working at the restaurant – who lost a daughter to the opioid crisis. He is racked with guilt for not listening to the doctors who suggested treatment, mistrustful since they had created the problem to begin with.

After emigrating to Germany alone when Yana is 16, Lilly treats a young seasonal agricultural worker for sunstroke and dehydration. Due to the bureaucracy involved, a nurse advises her not to report it to the police; the girl disappears through a window after receiving treatment. Elmy’s interrogation of capitalism, as she joins other Balkan voices, including the Albanian political philosopher Lea Ypi, as well as German authors such as Jenny Erpenbeck, querying the narrative of good vs evil spun after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Translated by the author and the International Booker Prize winning translator Angela Rodel.

Born to Guilt by Joanna Elmy, translated by Angela Rodel and Joanna Elmy, Faber & Faber £14.99, 368 pages.