She Who Remains

160 pages · paperback · Peirene Press · February 2026 · Translated by Izidora Angel

Home is where they clip your wings

A daughter arrives as a disappointment before she can speak. Bekija grows up in a mountain village where her father Murash wanted a son, and the Kanun wanted sons too: men to inherit, carry rifles, preserve honour and avenge the dead. She hears that demand early. She spends her childhood trying to answer it.

Rene Karabash's She Who Remains, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel, begins after the answer has already been given. Bekija has become Matija, a sworn virgin: a woman who takes a vow of celibacy under the ancient Albanian code of laws and is legally recognised as male. Matija lives alone with a cow, some pigeons and her dead father's house; she tells her story to a journalist. The novel lands in pieces: testimony, letters, songs, village gossip, ritual phrases and memories that surface before they explain themselves. Its fractured form runs along the same fault lines as the life it records.

The Kanun tradition imprisons Bekija as a woman and offers the only exit from that imprisonment. It keeps women from inheriting property, entering male spaces or moving through the world without male sanction. Bekija can escape those conditions only by erasing herself formally. She must kill Bekija as a woman for Matija to exist as a man. The bargain is shelter paid for with a name, a body and a future.

Bekija loves Dhana, a woman from the village, and chooses the oath. The Kanun does not punish one person at a time: it distributes consequence across everyone the code can reach. Bekija's brother Sále is marked for death in her place; Murash dies. The code does not improvise. It administers what was already written.

Matija speaks as someone who has carried too much for too long and cannot sort memory into clean order without falsifying it. The law has given her a life made of fragments, so the telling keeps its broken sequence. Birds, milk, blue, stones, blood, ropes, letters, shoes: the prose gathers charge through repeated return. In some sections, punctuation falls away and the voice runs on as if breath had turned to record. The reader loses the ground of chronology and stays inside a mind that cannot stop. Repetition works like chant. This is spoken testimony under pressure, cut through with lyric sequence and documents that arrive too late. The form is what remains when a life has no safe written record.

That absence of record is not incidental. Bekija cannot read, and the dairy where she and Dhana met is also where that absence is the trap: a place of private knowledge the Kanun keeps from women. Illiteracy is not a character detail. It is the condition the code enforces. Women are kept from knowledge and record, then punished inside systems they cannot fully read. Murash lied to Dhana. Sále withheld Dhana's letter. It sat unread for sixteen years. Matija cannot write her own defence. She cannot read the evidence of another life that might have been hers. She can only speak, and the journalist's recorder is the first archive of her life to exist outside the village.

In Sofia, doctors remove the remains of a partially formed twin brother from Matija's body. The village had judged Bekija before she could speak, before she could choose and before anyone could know what her body carried. The son Murash wanted was already inside her. He had been there the whole time, unborn, unburied, carried by the daughter the village would not forgive for arriving in his place. The discovery does not reverse the tragedy. It proves the village wrong too late. The verdict had already entered the house, the oath, the body and the years that followed.

Matija returns home. The novel opened on a girl hanging herself with her umbilical cord. It returns to that rope now, and Karabash turns it: the same rope pulls a newborn calf free. What opened as a noose closes as birth. The image turns. Matija does not.

She Who Remains measures the cost of remaining alive when survival requires self-erasure. The damage settles in what cannot be recovered: Bekija's name, her body's history, sixteen years with Dhana. Law, family and silence break a life into pieces; the novel denies that surviving them counts as survival. Truth does not repair the damage. It shows who has been carrying it.

★★★★★