Rasa Aškinytė

Virginija Cibarauskė. A Somewhat Ironical Novel About the Aestii

...Aškinytė’s fourth novel, Glesum, is an attempt at a new genre in her context. In Latin, the title of the novel means amber, a commodity that the Aestii people depicted in the novel traded with the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries. Glesum is also the name of one of the novel’s female protagonists. The period described is a time of prosperity for the Aestii tribes. Not much is known about the life of these tribes, but historians assume that the social order of the Aestii was close to matriarchal. That is why women are chosen as the main characters of the novel: Glesum, a slave brought from the Roman Empire by the tribal chief Gondas, his ambitious wife Selija, who is jealous of his new woman, and the sorceress of the tribe called “the woman with the wolf-picked leg” by everyone...

http://vilniusreview.com/reviews/188-a-somewhat-ironical-novel-about-the-aestii