This book has been on my wishlist forever, and I finally treated myself to a copy for the ‘Eastern European’ prompt for Queer Your Year 2024. Set in Bulgaria, Four Minutes is a bleak story told in vignettes, mostly centred around Leah, her childhood in a brutal children’s home and her adult life, documenting her struggles to adopt as a queer single woman. I was glad for the short chapters because this book is HEAVY. It doesn’t shy away from the terrible things that happen to children lost in the system. Amongst Leah’s story, Deleva intersperses short narratives from an assortment of other people - ageing ballerinas, Syrian refugees, young girls suffering horrific abuse. These are people whose voices are often lost in the melee, confined to the margins. I loved the idea of a literary equivalent of the four minute experiment - the idea that that’s the length of time it takes looking into someone’s eyes for them to stop feeling like a stranger. Moving and impactful, slightly too short.