Events in this novel unfold in Latvia during the eighties when a degree of change can be felt in the air yet the Soviet regime is still working against the population. There is still no right to freedom of assembly, including the right to associate with any religious group or anything else close to one’s heart yet not coinciding with Soviet ideology. The events described in the novel are based on true stories. One of the protagonists in the novel – a teenage boy named Pāvels - gets himself lost in the forest, his aim that of hiding from his own life, and his terrible secret. In the depths of the forest, he comes across a house inhabited by an enigmatic group of people. He has nowhere else to go so decides to stay with these weird, long-haired people who, other than their appearance, also think very differently from anyone else he has ever met. Whilst there, and in order to prove the existence of these people once he gets out of the forest, Pāvels starts keeping a diary.The text has several parallel plot lines and time merges into a single coil while still following a single thread.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

The novel Santiago tells the story of a woman who invites her friend’s seventeen-year-old son to go on a pilgrimage with her to Santiago de Compostela, ostensibly in an attempt to help him get over a drug addiction, but in truth to ensure she has a companion for a trip she is scared to undertake alone. They start in
 Paris and hitchhike all the way down to the Spanish border. The novel is told in 22 chapters, each representing both an Arcanum from the Tarot Arcanology of Light and a single day’s journey. The mismatched couple are ill-prepared for the trip; neither ever having climbed a mountain or embarked on such a long journey. The woman struggles to tolerate the young man’s lack of animation and passivity, yet she cannot simply abandon him along the roadside. While travelling, they meet an old man named Liberty (based on a true story) who has already undertaken the pilgrimage fourteen times and is now doing it for the last time in his life. While walking, they discuss their pasts and life in general, their path frequently crossing that of Liberty’s. Right up to the very end of the pilgrimage, the woman seeks to uncover the mysterious secret Liberty conceals and, in her quest to do so, discovers a secret hidden within herself.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv 

The Green Crow is a novel that explores the relationship between a human being and a bird, and is based on the assumption that such a bird, symbolizing profoundly experienced, true freedom, lives within us all. The green crow – a rare, conceited, boisterous creature – is that of the novel’s protagonist. She first meets the bird early in her childhood when the Green Crow emerges from her imaginary forest, a place to which the protagonist habitually runs to hide from the daily hurt and injustices she suffers, where she finds consolation in the tree house she has made herself. Searching for shelter and solace, she befriends the Green Crow. The main character’s family is very well-off and she wants for nothing. However, one day she finds herself in a psychiatric clinic following a spate of peculiar behavior, culminating in her telling her family about the Green Crow. The novel has two plotlines. One follows the protagonist’s adventures with the Green Crow, the other her search for some meaning to her life along the corridors of a mental institution, following her realization that family life has failed to confirm that life is beautiful and that anything more is needed.

Contact: Dace Sparāne-Freimane, dace.sparane-freimane@dgramata.lv