Booklist

Beginning with the lancing stories in The Question of Bruno (2000) and extending into his tour de force, The Lazarus Project (2008), MacArthur Fellow Hemon has been grappling with home, hate, and war within the crushing and ludicrous adventures of young Bosnian men growing up in doomed Yugoslavia, then plunging into the confounding demands of exile in America. In this riveting cycle of linked stories-within-stories, Hemon’s wannabe-poet narrator is abruptly introduced to geopolitical sleaze in Kinshasa, where his diplomat father is posted in 1983. Back home in Sarajevo, he runs amok on his first solo journey and sits at the feet of a celebrated poet, fueled by both reverence and resentment. He then travels to America just before war breaks out and discovers that obstacles to love loom everywhere.

Possessed of a phenomenal gift for translating feelings into concrete imagery in masterfully structured tales that end in stunning crescendos, Hemon infuses everything, from a freezer to bees in a hive, with barbed insights into our instinct for aggression, longing for connection, and unquenchable need to tell our stories, whether in poems, letters, drunken orations, or confessions to strangers. Hemon is a world-class writer of seismic depth, riptide humor, wine-dark language, and unflinching candor.