Sarajevo MarlboroPaperback, 15 December 2003

A remarkable and bracing collection of "classic anti-war writing" (Richard Flanagan) from Croatian writer Miljenko Jergovic, whose piercing prose recalls Kurt Vonnegut and Aleksander Hemon

Miljenko Jergovic's remarkable début collection of stories, Sarajevo Marlboro, earned him wide acclaim throughout Europe. In "melancholy, dreamlike" prose, the stories in Sarajevo Marlboro "recall Alan Lightman's Einstein's Dreams and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, but Jergovic's book is the strongest of the three" (Maud Newton). Croatian by birth, Jergovic spent his childhood in Sarajevo and chose to remain there throughout most of the war. These stories are distinctly of the material world, and they are shaped by Jergovic's deeply personal vision, subterranean humor, and a razor-sharp understanding of the fate of the city's young Muslims, Croats, and Serbs - the minute details of their interior lives in the foreground, the killing zone in the background.