A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Intelligent, honest, and full of heart, My Heart is an intimate work
of autobiographical fiction by one of ex-Yugoslavia's greatest writers
about his family's experience as refugees from the Bosnian war--a
timeless story of love, memory, and the resilience of the human spirit
that has all the qualities one might seek in a friend (Etgar Keret,
author of The Seven Goods Years).
Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die. When a writer suffers
a heart attack at the age of fifty, he must confront his mortality in a
country that is not his native home. Confined to a hospital bed and
overcome by a sense of powerlessness, he reflects on the fragility of
life and finds extraordinary meaning in the quotidian. In this affecting
autobiographical novel, Semezdin Mehmedinovic explores the love he and
his family have for one another, strengthened by trauma; their harrowing
experience of the Bosnian war, which led them to flee for the United
States as refugees; eerie premonitions of Donald Trump's presidency; the
life and work of a writer; and the nature of memory and grief.
Poetically explosive and pure to the core, My Heart serves as a kind
of mirror, reflecting our human strengths and weaknesses along with the
most important issues on our minds--love and death, the present and the
past, sickness and health, leaving and staying.
