Longlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize
Winner of the 2024 New York City Book Award
Finalist for the 2024 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
"Absolutely gorgeous. Taut as a thriller, lovely as a watercolor."-Jennifer Croft
In present-day New York City, an Albanian interpreter reluctantly agrees to work with Alfred, a Kosovar torture survivor, during his therapy sessions. Despite her husband's cautions, she soon becomes entangled in her clients' struggles: Alfred's nightmares stir up her own buried memories, and an impulsive attempt to help a Kurdish poet leads to a risky encounter and a reckless plan.
As ill-fated decisions stack up, jeopardizing the nameless narrator's marriage and mental health, she takes a spontaneous trip to reunite with her mother in Albania, where her life in the United States is put into stark relief. When she returns to face the consequences of her actions, she must question what is real and what is not. Ruminative and propulsive, Ledia Xhoga's debut novel, Misinterpretation, interrogates the darker legacies of family and country, and the boundary between compassion and self-preservation. Misinterpretation lays bare the viscerality and muscle of language and words, their propensity to fly off the page, or off the lips, and act on our world.
-Agni
A nuanced exploration of communication failures, blurred boundaries and the emotional cost of unchecked altruism.-Observer (UK)
Thrilling. . . . This debut novel explores the ways traumas of the past can impact how we experience the present.-Kirkus Reviews
An unnamed Albanian interpreter becomes enmeshed in the life of one of her clients, a Kosovar torture survivor, and reality begins to shift and blur.-Lit Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of 2024
Compassionate and well written, giving all of us a chance to consider how our histories impact the decisions we make today.-Book Page
Powerful and nuanced.-Electric Literature
An exceptionally rich novel.-Full Stop
An absolutely gorgeous novel, taut as a thriller, lovely as a watercolor, poetically incisive and wry. I devoured this book and was heartbroken when it was over. Ledia Xhoga is a great and visionary writer whose career I will follow eagerly in decades to come.-Jennifer Croft, author of The Extinction of Irena Rey
Ledia Xhoga is a superb chronicler of post-national existence, of a narrator shifting between disparate views of reality depending on what language she's speaking and with whom. Deft and insightful, Misinterpretation reveals the disorienting process of making choices in one language and then questioning them in another. This is a moving, exceptional first novel.
-Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need
Ledia Xhoga's novel about a woman whose life is on the brink of unraveling because of her good intentions explores the complexity of translating our own trauma, even to the people we love. With lyrical prose and a propulsive plot, Xhoga delves deep into the shadows of the human psyche, challenging readers to confront the darker legacies of the past while pondering the delicate balance between empathy and self-preservation. Ledia Xhoga has crafted a literary masterpiece that is as profound as it is unforgettable, solidifying her place as a talent to watch in the world of contemporary fiction.-Maisy Card, author of These Ghosts Are Family
Ledia Xhoga casts a riveting spell in this novel of an Albanian interpreter whose own shifting reality is as subject to misinterpretation as the words of her clients. A stunning debut.-Elizabeth Gaffney, author of When the World Was Young
If in the twenty-first century, Kafka had moved from Prague to Brooklyn, Misinterpretation is the novel I believe he would have written. Instead, Ledia Xhoga wrote it. She captures acorollary world to the one Josef K. inhabits in The Castle, but rather than not being able toreach the castle, Xhoga's nameless protagonist finds herself living in the castle, a polyglo
