At the Lucky Hand, aka The Sixty-Nine Drawers

Adam Lozanić, a poor student earning his keep as a proofreader for a tourist magazine, is given the job of correcting My Legacy, a forgotten 1936 novel by Anastas Branica. Branica's book is an odd one: it has no characters and no plot, only descriptions of rooms and places meant for himself and his beloved, so that the novel itself becomes the place where they meet. As Adam works through it, Branica's own fate comes to light, and almost everyone in the story turns out to be a reader who has stepped into the book. Behind this play of parallel worlds, the real one and the one made of literature, runs the history of Belgrade from the royal assassination of 1903 to the 1940s and the years of communist repression, with reading and love as the finest bonds between people.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

327 pages in the original

Genres

Love, Historical (assigned by AI)

Set in

Serbia, 1903–1940s

First published

2000 by Narodna knjiga – Alfa

Author's age

39 when first published

ISBN

9781646050147 (Deep Vellum Publishing, United States)