Flesh-Coloured Dominoes

When Baroness Valtraute von Bruegen’s officer husband’s body is severed in two she is delighted to find that the lower half has been sewn onto the upper body of the humble local Captain Ulste. She conceives a child only to see the return of her husband in one piece. What happens next is both indescribably funny and darkly painful.

A beautifully written surrealist novel cum political allegory, Flesh-Coloured Dominoes transports the reader between 18th Century Baltic gentry and the narrator’s life in the modern world. The connection between the two narratives gradually becomes clear in a mesmerising fantasy of love, lust and loss as Skujiņš creates a work of sublime art that is funny, moving, enlightening and philosophical in equal measure.

'Skujiņš is a master at personae and a cosmopolitan writer, filling his landscapes with extraordinary and unforgettable characters’ World Literature Today

‘There are few figures in contemporary Latvian literature as well respected as Zigmunds Skujiņš’ Virginia Quarterly Review