★KRESNIK PRIZE 2024 FOR THE BEST SLOVENIAN NOVEL
★Rights sold to Croatia, Slovakia, Ukraine.

In this novel, the author openly addresses infertility, artificial insemination, and abortion – topics that remain taboo even today. At the center of the writing stands the woman, her social roles, and above all, her body.

In Expectations by Anja Mugerli, we follow the story of Jana and Primož, who long for a child. They are constantly reminded by those around them that the time for having children is running out. The expectations of others and of society inevitably shape the expectations we carry within ourselves. Sometimes such “great expectations” can paralyze us, reshape our own desires, or amplify them to the point of consuming our entire lives. For Jana and Primož, expectation soon proves not to be joyful, but painful and difficult.
The fertility clinic. Even its very name provokes feelings of unease and even fear during the first visit. What follows are unpleasant examinations, surgery, monitoring of the ovaries, more and less invasive procedures, blood test results, and finally the diagnosis: unexplained infertility. Into the darkness, cold, and silence that pervade the story of Expectations, light, nature, and especially art repeatedly break in, softening the weight of life.


“They took her uterus and reshaped it anew, as if it were made of clay.”

“I got my period, which means I can start therapy. After months of despair, for the first time bleeding doesn’t mean sorrow, but excitement - not an end, but a beginning.”

“Once someone asked me whether I thought children conceived in a test tube were the same as children conceived naturally. At the time, I was puzzled by the question - of course they are the same, they are all children, I said something like that, and today I think no differently. And yet the idea of going through it myself still seems repulsive.”

“As I lie on the bed with the ultrasound probe inside me, I cannot help but feel defeated in a way. I’m back at the beginning again.”
“This is not the kind of fear that makes you want to run away, but the kind that makes you want to hold everything inside yourself - like a person losing their memory, trying to keep all the faces, words, and feelings in their mind.”

“I read that the body we are born into is not the same as the one in which we leave this world. Later, when I would undress in Ivan’s studio, I would feel with every pore of my skin that Guadalupe Nettel was right.”