In National Mourning, I return to a world where history no longer feels distant, but deeply personal.
This novella is part of my larger series inspired by real memories from Eastern Europe during the final years of the socialist era — a time when entire systems were beginning to crack, yet ordinary people were still trying to understand what the future might demand from them.
Unlike revolutions that arrive with celebration and noise, some historical moments come wrapped in silence, uncertainty, and quiet grief. National Mourning explores precisely this fragile atmosphere: the feeling that an old world is dying before a new one has fully learned how to breathe.
As a young man growing up behind the Iron Curtain, I witnessed how politics entered everyday life — through fear, loyalty, confusion, and the strange intimacy of collective uncertainty. This novella is not only about the collapse of a political system, but about the emotional weight carried by those who lived through it.
National Mourning belongs to the same literary journey as Chernobyl, The Wall, The Border, and Velvet — stories connected not only by history, but by memory.
Because sometimes the end of an era is not announced by triumph.
Sometimes it arrives quietly, like a country lowering its voice.