Music is a universal thing. It can connect people across continents, break language, class and cultural barriers, and resonate down through the ages. 

Music can link lives generations apart, bound together inexplicably by their love of singers or songs. 

This cosmic pull is perpetuated by Kristina Gavran in her elegant novel Gitara od palisandra. 

This is a novel about female power. A novel about five women centuries apart linked by an invisible thread. Five women whose destinies were shifted by the smallest of things. Five women who experience pain, love and desire. 

It is the story of a protector, a lover, a wife, a mother, a warrior. An orphan who makes guitars, a free spirit unbound by restrictions, a musician whose future is suddenly altered. 

Gavran’s arrangement is subtle and precise. Her composition explores the significance of chance and fate, and the notions of sacrifice and love. 

The motif of the guitar binds the five stories together. As the text strums along, story after story, note after note, it pulls the reader into a glorious crescendo in which all the lives meet. 

Kristina Gavran (1987) has had two books published by the Croatian publishing company Disput: in 2016, Rain in India, Summer in Berlin, a collection of short stories connected with the theme of travelling, and in 2018 the novel Gitara od palisandra.