Where You Come From
Winner of the German Book Prize
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
A powerful exploration of identity and belonging, Where You Come From is the major new novel from internationally acclaimed and bestselling author Saša Stanišic
Saša Stanišic's Where You Come From is a novel about a village where only thirteen people remain, a country that no longer exists, a shattered family that is his own. Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Stanišic traces a family's escape during the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the years that followed as they built a life in Germany. As he explores what it means to be European today, he examines how it feels to learn a new language, to find new friends and new jobs, and to build an identity between countries and cultures.
Translated by Damion Searls, Where You Come From is about homelands, both remembered and imagined. A book that bends form and genre with wit, heart, and exceptional craftsmanship to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.
'Wonderfully inventive and impressive.' - Guardian
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sardonic if uneven novel, Stanišić (How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone) composes a digressive shape-shifting self-portrait with some mesmerizing elements. Bosnian-born novelist Saša, living in Germany, doles out short vignettes of his family's life in Tito-era Yugoslavia, their post–Balkan War asylum in Germany, and reunions in present-day Bosnia Herzegovina. His grandmother, a steely presence, is the beating heart of the book, and Saša is fascinated by Oskorusa, the small mountainous town where she lived as a young woman. As her dementia worsens, Saša and his parents return to Bosnia to say goodbye and visit Oskorusa. Having lived in Germany since he was a boy, Saša confronts his mixed feelings over his heritage and indulges in his propensity for invention, using fiction to fill in the gaps of "uncompleted sentences, vanished memories." The wry accounts about his ancestors are highlights, though the novel sags in a long middle section about Saša's teenage years in Heidelberg, and a choose-your-own-adventure–style conclusion feels a bit gimmicky. Still, the writing often surprises, and the narrator displays a winning ludic spirit in the face of tragedy and dislocation. Though a bit too precious at times, at its best this taps into the mythic energies of the author's homeland.
