In 2016, the novel You Can`t Get All You Want was nominated for the Annual Latvian Literature Award. It is a melancholy, yet mirthful tale of the human fate as perceived by the everyman. It is a story of young people, easy to empathize with, desperately struggling not to become yet another lost generation. The novel centres around love and death, search for the meaning of life, and inability to adapt oneself to the contemporary society.

The central characters are four friends: a dilettante artist Pepin, Sophie who works at an erotic massage parlour, a crematorium stoker Willy, and Betty, a poet. They spend a summer together wandering around Riga and talking about life. The plot is triggered by the sudden disappearance of Sophie’s mother. Everybody joins the search, simultaneously searching for their own selves, for love and their place in life. Eventually it turns out Sophie’s mother has pawned her soul and then hanged herself. In the course of the novel, Pepin tries to settle his difficult relationship with his father. He fails since his father, ill with cancer, sells his body to an Exhibition of Bodies, is taken to Switzerland and euthanized. Sophie and Pepin, who is madly in love with her, are forced to emigrate, and their ways part. In the meantime, Willy, who initially was a misogynist, forms a family with Betty, having burned her former lover alive in the crematorium furnace.

Contacts: Vladis Spāre, vladis.spare@gmail.com