Bluebird

starts on a morning that the protagonist believes to be the end of her life. An immigrant from Eastern Europe, the narrator has spent the last ten years striving to be a writer or a journalist in London and failing on every front. In a bid to try and save herself, she takes a month off from her catering job and takes us down memory lane of experiences of being a young immigrant woman as well as a struggling artist. Minimum-wage jobs, unpaid internships, school certificates, rented rooms in dangerous-feeling areas, nightlife, rejections, family expectations: these are all entwined in her inner monologue as she fights for her own life before time runs out.

Without sentimentality, Sonia Hadj Said's captivating novella records the casual cruelties of life and its fleeting moments of human connection and tenderness as an immigrant woman attempts to reconcile herself to the world around her.