Shortly after the book's protagonists moved into their apartment complex
in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war
and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later,
in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively
stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be.
Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet
critical portrait of people's sense that they were in limbo, trapped in
a seemingly endless "Meantime." Ethnographically investigating yearnings
for "normal lives" in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh
analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are
caught shape our hopes and fears.