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The Fortress is one of the most significant and fascinating novels to come out of the former Yugoslavia. Ahmet Shabo returns home to eighteenth-century Sarajevo from the war in Russia, numbed by the death in battle or suicide of nearly his entire military unit. In time he overcomes the anguish of war, only to find that he has emerged a reflective and contemplative man in a society that does not value, and will not tolerate, the subversive implications of these qualities.
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Sheikh Nuruddin is a dervish at a Sarajevo monastery in the eighteenth century during the Turkish occupation. When his brother is arrested, he descends into the Kafkaesque world of the Turkish authorities in order to find out what has happened. As he does so, he begins to question his relations with society as a whole and, eventually, his life choices in general. Hugely successful when published in the 1960s, Death and the Dervish appears here in its first English translation.
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A senior UN official's account of the war in Bosnia as he experienced it on duty in Sarajevo.
At the innocent age of fifteen, Selma is just beginning to experience the power of her first love. Unfortunately, living in Bosnia in 1992, Selma and her parents soon find themselves targets of the Bosnian War, and her father is arrested by the Serb Army and held for questioning. In an attempt to protect her daughter, Selma's mother sends Selma to stay with her aunt, but that seems to be a mistake. Days after arriving, the city is attacked, her family members are murdered before her eyes, and Selma is thrown into a concentration camp where she lives out her worst nightmare. After losing nearly all those she loves, being abused by those whom she once trusted, and witnessing prejudice at its u...
Bekim Sejranovic's From Nowhere to Nowhere is a subtle yet unforgettable meditation on the factors that shape identity. The novel's unnamed narrator, raised by his grandparents and scattered to the wind from his hometown of Brcko, Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, travels to Croatia and Norway, trying to reclaim a sense of self he isn't sure he ever possessed in the first place. From his days playing soccer with friends on Unity Street outside his home to Muslim funerals, his job as an interpreter for Balkan refugees, and his fractious relationships with women, a nomadic aesthetic emerges brilliantly rendering what it means to live a life from which you have always been removed.
This grand novel encompasses nearly all of Yugoslavia’s tumultuous twentieth century, from the decline of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires through two world wars, the rise and fall of communism, the breakup of the nation, and the terror of the shelling of Dubrovnik. Tackling universal themes on a human scale, master storyteller Miljenko Jergovic traces one Yugoslavian family’s tale as history irresistibly casts the fates of five generations. What is it to live a life whose circumstances are driven by history? Jergovic investigates the experiences of a compelling heroine, Regina Delavale, and her many family members and neighbors. Telling Regina’s story in reverse chronology, the author proceeds from her final days in 2002 to her birth in 1905, encountering along the way such traumas as atrocities committed by Nazi Ustashe Croats and the death of Tito. Lyrically written and unhesitatingly told, The Walnut Mansion may be read as an allegory of the tragedy of Yugoslavia’s tormented twentieth century.
After surviving kidnapping and injuries in the Manitoba wild, seventeen-year-old Jake and fifteen-year-old Izzy finally return home to the town of Thompson. They're greeted as heroes by their friends and loved ones, but Jake and Izzy's hometown has changed and is now deeply divided. Mistrust is everywhere, and a group from one side of Thompson-including Parnell, the de facto leader, and Boyd, an angry teen-grow increasingly hostile to their neighbors. Despite Thompson's strife, Jake is on a mission to find his missing father. But in a world growing more dangerous, a native like Jake must search carefully to avoid being caught up in the tensions swirling around town. Meanwhile, Izzy uncovers a terrifying plot and must warn Jake before it's too late. Filled with gripping action, Joe Beernink's sequel to Nowhere Wild leads to a dramatic confrontation between two groups brutally divided by hatred and fear. In the end, only Izzy can keep Thompson from destroying itself altogether.
When the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina broke out a baffled world sought explanations from a range of experts who offered a variety of reasons for the conflict. The author of this study takes Bosnian affairs seriously and in so doing makes it much easier to grasp why the war occurred.