Across thirty striking tales, Monika Radojevic weaves together the surreal with the everyday, confronting the experiences of contemporary womanhood with a tender ferocity shot through with humour.
A woman walks into a bar, and nobody notices. A newly married couple are punished for their childlessness with an unsettling nocturnal invasion. A girl trades her vocal cords for a chance at freedom. A door-to-door salesperson offers the antidote to women’s fear – but it comes at a high price.
Bubbling with an urgent rage that occasionally tips over into vengeance, Radojevic deftly charts the moments that make a life: from the warmth of first love to the recognition of anger, and the possibilities that take shape as we find or lose our ability to speak. A Beautiful Lack of Consequence explores the ways in which the world bends and breaks women with the pressure it puts on them – and what happens when those women snap back.
Moving and irreverent, dark and otherworldly, A Beautiful Lack of Consequence is a blazing debut collection from the winner of the #Merky Books New Writers’ Prize.
Monika Radojevic is a Brazilian-Montenegrin writer and poet who was born and raised in London. She spent years working in the feminist and political sector, and her writing is a continuous exploration of power dynamics, inequality and freedom. Monika is the inaugural winner of the #Merky Books New Writers’ prize, and writes to make sense of life. She has previously published a volume of poetry, Teeth in the Back of My Neck, and a short story collection, A Beautiful Lack of Consequence. Strangerland is her debut novel.
Read: Menace by Monika Radojevic, Wasafiri
First lines: The first time it happens, no one realises what they’re witnessing. Not even later, when the vanishings dominate the headlines, do the people in the park realise they were there, front row, when it began.