Mika is a divorced university professor and a mother to a teenage girl. Her own mother passed away during childbirth, and she was raised by her grandmothers, two very contrasting women: Hiba is always on the go, brimming with vitality and laughter, while Đulsa spends her days on the couch listening to melancholic songs, lost in her thoughts. Mika feels drained and adrift in her own life, lacking direction, purpose and coherent narrative to guide her through life’s challenges – from a failed marriage to an alcoholic husband, to a brief affair with a married man – and finds herself caught in between the opposing forces of her grandmothers.

This fragmented novel, told by Mika and Đulsa, explores the female side of a family and delves into secrets, feelings of isolation, the struggle to uncover the truth, and the complexities of love. Above all, it examines different ways of existing and the interplay between reality and fantasy.

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“A novel that raises questions – about the space we can carve out for ourselves, deeply rooted in the forces that arise from the familial and societal context, and the courage to gravitate towards the unknown and the individual.” – Jagna Pogačnik

“In her new novel Gravities, Senka Marić explores the boundaries of female intimate freedom.” – Ružica Ljubičić

“Senka Marić delves further into questioning memories and influences that shape women. Her narrative, fragmented into figures of speech and images of memories and dreams, [….] reminds us of how complex our relationship with the body as a repository of energy and pain truly is, and to what extent the body itself is an atlas of meanings.” – Vladislava Gordić Petković

“Subtly and uniquely, Gravities by Senka Marić articulates what is impossible to say about the female body and being, heaviness and happiness, pain and scars, choicelessness and freedom, and the sense and meaning of a woman’s life […]. It is a genuine novel and an uncommon literary piece of art.” – Selma Raljević

“After the exceptionally successful novel Body Kintsugi, […] Senka Marić has written an equally multilayered work that also brings us a story about the female experience, solitude, and the search for meaning.” – Kristina Ljevak

“So poignant, yet simultaneously witty and skillfully narrated, […] the novel represents the mature voice of a writer who confidently commands both form and language.” – Vladimir Arsenić

 

202 pages – Original language: Bosnian (Buybook, 2021). Foreign Editions: Croatian (V.B.Z., 2023)