Publisher Description
The city of Vukovar, situated on Croatia's easternmost periphery, across the Danube River from Serbia, was the site of some of the worst violence in the wars that rocked ex-Yugoslavia in the early '90s. It is referred to only as "the city" throughout this taut political thriller from one of Europe's most celebrated young writers. In this city without a name, fences in schoolyards separate the children of Serbs from those of Croats, and city leaders still fight to free themselves from violent crimes they committed—or permitted—during the war a generation ago. Now, it is left to a new generation—the children, now grown up—to extricate themselves from this tragic place, innocents who are nonetheless connected in different ways to the crimes of the past.
Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion—a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her students, a Serb, and is now in prison for having murdered her husband. But Nora herself is the daughter of a man who was murdered years earlier under mysterious circumstances. And she wants, if not to avenge her father, at least to bring to justice whoever committed the crime.
Contains mature themes.
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About Ivana Bodrožić
Ivana Bodrožic was born in Vukovar, Croatia, in 1982 where she lived until the Yugoslav wars started in 1991. That year her father disappeared while fighting for Croatian independence and she and the rest of her family moved to Kumrovec, where they stayed at a hotel for displaced persons. At first listed neither as dead nor injured nor missing, her father was eventually found to have been murdered along with at least three hundred others in what became known as the Vukovar Hospital Massacre. Bodrožic continued her education and eventually studied at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. In 2005 she published her first poetry collection, The First Step into Darkness. Her first novel The Hotel Tito was published in 2010, receiving high praise from both critics and audiences and becoming a Croatian bestseller. Bodrožic has since published her second poetry collection, A Crossing for Wild Animals and a short story collection 100% Cotton. Her most recent novel, The Pit, a political thriller, will be published in 2019.
About Xe Sands
Xe Sands has more than a decade of experience bringing stories to life through narration, performance, and visual art, including recordings of the Nightwalkers series from Jaquelyn Frank. She has received several honors, including AudioFile Earphones Awards and a coveted Audie Award, and she was named Favorite Debut Romance Narrator of 2011 in the Romance Audiobooks poll.