Short, concise, masterfully written, The World I Chose is a brave testimony of а woman who passes through her personal transformations, as well as through the transformations of the world that we choose only after a choice was imposed on us, which may have inflicted harm and sorrow. The personal story of Leona, a middle-aged woman who leaves her husband, home, the life and status she has had, and starts from scratch in a cellar room in Skopje is interwoven with the social criticism of the educational reforms through the story of the Education Committee that Leona collaborates with. Authentically explored, and stylistically refined, Leona’s character is the character of a woman who transforms her vulnerability, loneliness, sudden poverty and profound uncertainty within the patriarchal environment into a new opportunity and resoluteness to choose, to choose herself, but also those she would love and feel as her own. Her identity changes with the force of her integrity and the introspective process of gaining self-awareness and rehabilitation of her own existence, as well as hopeful closeness with the new acquaintances and living conditions in which she finds herself. This novel is the so needed literary insight into the vulnerability and power of the human microcosmic situation in the macrocosm of the system. The World I Chose by Kalina Maleska is a novel that awakens, encourages and offers hope for a better world that everyone must decide to choose on their own.

(from the statement of the Committee of the “Slavko Janevski” Foundation)