A short book that is rather surreal but that ultimately packs a thought-provoking punch. Nero Book Awards Debut Fiction shortlist.

Lara Haworth’s Monumenta is the kind of novel that reads like a fever dream—hypnotic, unsettling, absurd, and yet startlingly profound. I picked it up because of its place on the NERO shortlist and, admittedly, because the protagonist shares a name with one of my favourite literary monikers: Olga. But what I found within its pages was an experience that defies easy categorisation. This is a book that burrows into the psyche, posing weighty existential and political questions while cloaked in a surreal, almost hallucinatory atmosphere.

At its heart, Monumenta is about memory—what we choose to enshrine and what we conveniently forget. Olga Pavic, our beleaguered yet oddly detached protagonist, receives a letter informing her that her house will be demolished to make way for a monument commemorating a massacre. Which massacre? No one seems to know. Three architects arrive, each with a wildly different proposal: a crater to honour the assassination of the Serbian monarchy, a skyscraping shopping mall that swallows the house whole, and a grotesque accumulation of displaced statues. Each vision is equally plausible, equally absurd. Through these encounters, Haworth skewers the performative nature of remembrance, the politics of grief, and the sheer arbitrariness of what is deemed worthy of public mourning.

The novel oscillates between the personal and the political, never fully settling in either realm. Olga’s children, Hilde and Danilo, are summoned home for a final dinner in the house that raised them, their individual traumas hovering just beneath the surface. There are hints of old wounds—estrangement, queerness, disappointments that remain unspoken. Haworth never over-explains, trusting the reader to navigate the undercurrents of emotion and implication.

Stylistically, Monumenta is an acid trip in literary form—fluid and disorienting, laced with mordant humour and moments of piercing insight. It is at once deeply rooted in Serbian history and untethered from any single place or time, its themes rippling outward to resonate with our collective, global failure to reckon with history in any meaningful way. The novel reminds us that memory is malleable, that monuments are as much about erasure as they are about commemoration, and that sometimes, the act of remembering is just another way of forgetting.

This is not a novel that offers answers—it is a novel that revels in its own uncertainty. It reads like a riddle, a puzzle without a solution. And perhaps that’s the point. Some books linger not for their clarity, but for their ability to disorient. Monumenta is one of those books. Odd in the best possible way, it is both a satire and a lament, a playful intellectual exercise and an unsettling meditation on loss. It is brief but vast, confounding but rewarding—a minor miracle of ambiguity and wit.

3.25 / 5