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"A brilliant debut novel" about a young Bosnian War refugee who finds the secret to survival in language and stories (Los Angeles Times).
For Aleksandar Krsmanović, Grandpa Slavko's stories endow life in Višegrad with a kaleidoscopic brilliance. Neighbors, friends, and family past and present take on a mythic quality; the River Drina courses through town like the pulse of life itself. So when his grandfather dies suddenly, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition. But then soldiers invade Višegrad—a town previously unconscious of racial and religious divides—and it's no longer important that Aleksandar is the best magician in the nonaligned states; suddenly it is important to have the right last name and to convince the soldiers that Asija, the Muslim girl who turns up in his apartment building, is his sister.
Alive with the magic of childhood, the surreality of war and exile, and the power of language, every page of this glittering novel thrums with the joy of storytelling.
"Wildly inventive." —San Francisco Chronicle
"Poignant and hauntingly beautiful." —The Village Voice
"A funny, heartbreaking, beautifully written novel." —The Seattle Times
Praise for How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone
“A bold, questing work of art.”—Los Angeles Times
“Funny, heartbreaking, beautifully written.”—The Seattle Times
“Wildly inventive . . . It rages rough and broad and joyful.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“The magic of storytelling lies at the heart of Saša Stanišic’s sensational debut. . . . A book that will dominate the discourse on how children experience war for a long time to come.”—Foreign Policy
“Poignant and hauntingly beautiful.”—The Village Voice
“Will convert skeptics with the sheer force of its emotional power.”—The Oregonian
“An astonishing accomplishment . . . Enthralling, something you can’t put down.”—Deseret News (Salt Lake City)
“Dazzling . . . A novel rich with experience and imagination.”—Kirkus Reviews
Sasa Stanisic was born in Bosnia–Herzegovina in 1978. At the age of fourteen, he fled to Germany with his family and went on to study literature in Heidelberg and Leipzig. How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is his first novel.