Publisher Description
A young survivor of the Bosnian War returns to his homeland to confront the people who betrayed his family. The story behind the YA novel World in Between: Based on a True Refugee Story.
At age eleven, Kenan Trebincevic was a happy, karate-loving kid living with his family in the quiet Eastern European town of Brcko. Then, in the spring of 1992, war broke out and his friends, neighbors and teammates all turned on him. Pero—Kenan’s beloved karate coach—showed up at his door with an AK-47 —screaming: “You have one hour to leave or be killed!” Kenan’s only crime: he was Muslim. This poignant, searing memoir chronicles Kenan’s miraculous escape from the brutal ethnic cleansing campaign that swept the former Yugoslavia. After two decades in the United States, Kenan honors his father’s wish to visit their homeland, making a list of what he wants to do there. Kenan decides to confront the former next door neighbor who stole from his mother, see the concentration camp where his Dad and brother were imprisoned and stand on the grave of his first betrayer to make sure he’s really dead. Back in the land of his birth, Kenan finds something more powerful—and shocking—than revenge.
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“The great instruction of this important work is the author’s moral transformation that helped him replace hate with grace, if not forgiveness.”
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Publishers Weekly
About the Authors
Kenan Trebincevic is a Bosnian Muslim who survived the ethnic cleansing in the Balkan War and came to the United States with his family in 1993. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Slate, Salon, Esquire, Newsday, the Best American Travel Writing, on NPR, Al Jazeera, NY1, and the BBC. He lives with his wife in Astoria, Queens. www.KenanTrebincevic.com.
Susan Shapiro is an award-winning Jewish-American journalist and popular writing professor at New York University and the New School as well as the author/coauthor of several books including the New York Times bestseller Unhooked. Her work regularly appears in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Salon, The Atlantic, Oprah.com, Elle, Marie Claire, The Forward, and Tablet. She lives with her husband in Manhattan.
About Fajer Al-Kaisi
January LaVoy, winner of numerous awards for narration, was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. She is an American actress best known for her character Noelle Ortiz on the ABC daytime drama One Life to Live. In addition to working extensively in narration and television, including roles on Law & Order and All My Children, she has worked on and off Broadway as well as in regional theater.