A beautiful and heartrending novel that unfolds through the perspective of a young girl, who relays lively tales of cruel pranks and jovial reconciliations, pain and tenderness, despair and hope of real-life young children who grow up alone.

"Corobca's novel not only reports with tenderness and wit on the pain and patience of abandoned children, it also traces the economic, social and moral decay of the rural milieu with wide awake realism." —Andreas Breitenstein, New Zurich

With her parents gone in search of work, twelve-year-old Cristina must act as a mother to her two younger brothers. Through her eyes, we roam the streets of a contemporary Moldovan village. Just as many of the adults left their countryside and homes with the desire to earn a better income, their parents also went to the world for money, the mother to Italy, the father to Siberia, and the children were left to fend for themselves. Here the youth must learn to survive on their own; they grow up fast, imitating the gestures of the absent adults, and chasing their fading memories of normal family life.

Kinderland is the second novel by Moldovan novelist Liliana Corobca to be translated into English. The first was The Censor’s Notebook (2022), which won the prestigious Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2023, remarkably so since it was also the translator, Monica Cure’s, first attempt at a book-length translation. The next novel by the same author and translator team, Kinderland deals with a painful true reality, which has over time grown to become a phenomenon: the lives and struggles of children left home alone by parents who have gone to work abroad.