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WORK TITLE: They Are Trying to Break Your Heart
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.davidsavill.com/
CITY: Manchester, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY:
http://www.bloomsbury.com/author/david-savill/ * http://www.salford.ac.uk/arts-media/arts-media-academics/david-savill * http://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-savill-break-your-heart-20161209-story.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Children: two.
EDUCATION:Birkbeck College, University of Central London, M.A. Received degree from University of East Anglia.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Teacher and author. British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), producer and journalist; University of Salford, Creative Writing instructor. Creative Writing Programme Leader, University of Salford. Also taught at St Mary’s University, Brunel University, University of East London, and Imperial College.
MEMBER:National Association of Writer’s in Education.
AWARDS:Bridport Prize, 2009, for Table Rock Lake.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Routes Ahead.
SIDELIGHTS
David Savill primarily works as a writer and professor, though he spent part of his career working in journalism. He was aligned with BBC for nearly a decade. Prior to starting his professional life, Savill studied, worked, and resided in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where his life and the lives of those he knew were greatly affected by ongoing war.
His experiences from this period are what inform his novel, They Are Trying to Break Your Heart. The novel focuses on two central characters: Marko Novak and Anya Teal. Both of them find their lives to be deeply intertwined with the Bosnian War, and their relationship with one man, albeit in different ways. Marko escaped from Bosnia a long time ago and was able to pick up the pieces of his life in England. At the start of the book, he is just returning to his home country in search of a woman by the name of Vesna, as well as to simply make peace with the earlier portion of his life. Vesna’s importance comes through her fling with Marko, as well as her romantic connection to Marko’s friend, Kemal Leki. At the same time, Anya is personally pursuing Kemal for her own reasons. In Bosnia, Kemal is a wanted man, guilty of war crimes and possibly dodging prosecution by playing dead. Her investigation leads her to the shores of Thailand, where she in turn encounters Marko and another, separate tragedy none of the book’s characters could have imagined. In Library Journal, Lawrence Rungren called They Are Trying to Break Your Heart “a vivid, memorable depiction of the intersection of individual lives with major events.” A Publishers Weekly contributor remarked that “Savill skillfully depicts the aid workers, perpetrators, victims, and survivors involved in two blurry moments of international crisis.” A reviewer in an issue of Kirkus Reviews stated: “Savill’s first novel shows his deep compassion for and understanding of two earth-shattering events.” Los Angeles Times Online reviewer Melissa Holbrook Pierson commented: “No small additional encouragement is the author’s ability to explore moral complexities in lean and evocative prose, with a light hand on the symbolism.” On the Chicago Review of Books website, Sara Cutaia wrote: “The novel profoundly examines issues as expansive as global war and as intricate as two humans in a relationship.” Cathy Layne, a contributor to the New York Journal of Books Online, expressed that “the book is most memorable for its depiction of war-torn Bosnia and its message that the love and friendship between Marko, Kemal, Vesna and their friends and families, can transcend the senselessness of civil war.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2016, review of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart.
Library Journal, January 1, 2017, Lawrence Rungren, review of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart, p. 93.
Publishers Weekly, October 17, 2016, review of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart, p. 45.
ONLINE
Chicago Review of Books, https://chireviewofbooks.com/ (December 16, 2016), Sara Cutaia, “‘They Are Trying to Break Your Heart’ Lacks Precision, But So Does War,” review of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart.
David Savill Website, https://www.davidsavill.com (July 26, 2017), author profile.
Los Angeles Times Online, http://www.latimes.com/ (December 9, 2016), Melissa Holbrook Pierson, “Former journalist David Savill’s fiction debut, ‘They are Trying to Break Your Heart’, is searing,” review of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart.
New York Journal of Books Online, http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (July 1, 2017), Cathy Layne, review of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart.
University of Salford, Manchester Website, http://www.salford.ac.uk/ (July 26, 2017), author profile.*
Find out more about David, author events, and read his essays at davidsavill.com.
David Savill's novels explore the places where personal stories become political stories.
In the last year of the Bosnian war, David lived as a teacher and a student among the refugees of Srebrenica. In an eight-year career as a BBC Current Affairs journalist, he worked on Panorama, This World, Real Story, World at One and PM.
His first novel, They Are Trying to Break Your Heart, follows the story of a Bosnian man who seeks the truth about his childhood friend as a Human Rights Researcher discovers her own truths. David's second novel, Disinformation, will tell the story of a journalist caught up in Vladimir Putin's rise to power.
David is Programme Leader of Creative Writing at the University of Salford
I am a writer, former journalist, and writing teacher.
My debut novel, They Are Trying To Break Your Heart, was published by Bloomsbury in April 2016, chosen as a Netgalley book of the month, reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Times, Publisher's Weekly and by Kirkus Reviews. It has been chosen as one of ten books longlisted for The Desmond Elliott Prize, the UK's biggest prize for debut fiction.
It was released in the USA, in December 2016, and will be available in paperback in April 2017.
I teach Creative Writing at The University of Salford in Manchester.
My work is interested in the places where the personal and political collide, in the fiction of global affairs, and the aftermath of conflicts.
My second novel, is going to take us from the collapse of the Soviet Union, to Putin's propaganda wars.
In the last year of the Bosnian war, David lived as a teacher and a student among the refugees of Srebrenica, helping to organise a summer university for students in the safe-haven of Tuzla. Over the past fifteen years he has returned to Bosnia several times. Tuzla, and the real story of its 'Youth Day' massacre, became the inspiration for the fictional town of Stovnik. In an eight-year career as a BBC Current Affairs journalist, David worked on Panorama, This World, Real Story, World at One and PM. In 2004, he arrived on the beaches of Phuket two days after the Indian Ocean Tsunami. He spent the next six months in Thailand and Sri Lanka, where he made two documentaries about the aftermath of the disaster. David now has two children and teaches Creative Writing at the University of Salford in Manchester.
davidsavill.com / @SavillDavid
Writes: General Fiction
Author of : They are Trying to Break Your Heart
David Savill
Lecturer
Crescent House 208
T: 0161 295 2755
E: D.Savill@salford.ac.uk
Twitter: @savilldavid
Office Times
Please email for appointments
Biography
For ten years, I worked as a current affairs and news documentary producer with the BBC. In April 2016 I published my debut novel with Bloomsbury.
I graduated in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and completed an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of Central London. I have taught Creative Writing at Brunel University, Imperial College, University of East London, and St Mary’s University, where I founded a successful MA in the practice of producing ‘first’ novels.
Teaching
I will be Creative Writing Programme Leader at the University of Salford in 2017.
I teach Writing Fiction, where we focus on getting undergraduate students started on a novel. I also teach short story form, poetry, and memoir writing.
I am always interested in helping students develop any kind of narrative prose.
Research Interests
My research is my practice. I am currently working on my second novel – the story of a journalist who goes missing around the time of Vladimir Putin’s rise to power.
My current interests as a novelist lead me to think about and examine how novels tell political stories, and in themselves contribute on political terms toward our increasingly complex and confusing narrative culture.
How we live in what has been called a ‘post-truth’ society is a primary theme of my second novel. The tension between memorialisation, remembering and forgetting in a traumatised society, was a theme of my debut.
I am interested in telling stories with an international scope, articulating the dilemmas of lives caught in the teeth of international affairs. Reviewing my debut novel, The Los Angeles Times called this ‘a mash up of the international thriller and novel of ideas’.
These research themes progress from my work as an international current affairs documentary producer, through my writing practice.
Qualifications and Memberships
National Association of Writer’s in Education
Publications
They Are Trying to Break Your Heart, a novel: Bloomsbury (UK, US, Canada) (April 2016)
“Table Rock Lake” short story, Routes Ahead, Tindal Street Press, singled for praise in The Independent Newspaper and awarded a Bridport Prize, (2009)
MIR 5, “Free Country” Birkbeck Press, University College London (2009)
“A Death in the Family” short story, Hard Shoulder Tindal Street Press. Singled for praise in The Guardian newspaper. (2009)
Savill, David. They Are Trying To Break Your Heart
Lawrence Rungren
142.1 (Jan. 1, 2017): p93.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Savill, David. They Are Trying To Break Your Heart. Bloomsbury USA. Dec. 2016. 268p. ISBN 9781632865465. $26; ebk. ISBN 9781632865489. F
Ranging from the Balkan War of the 1990s to the early 2000s, and from Bosnia to Thailand, Savill's first novel traces the fates of four people linked by love and war. Anya Teal is a human rights researcher on the trail of Kemal Leki, a suspected Bosnian war criminal generally believed to have died during the war. Meanwhile, Kemal's close friend Marko Novak returns to Bosnia in 2005 after building a new life in England, seeking both his past and Vesna, Kemal's onetime girlfriend, with whom he had also been briefly involved. Anya's research leads her to believe that Kemal is alive in Thailand. She ventures there, inviting former boyfriend William, who runs a school in Bangkok, to join her for the Christmas holidays, with the hope of reviving their relationship. Fate will find the three of them at a beachside resort as the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 hits. VERDICT Though billed as a literary thriller, this first novel is more thought-provoking than suspenseful, as Savill mixes the personal with the political in an exploration of complex interrelationships of guilt and innocence and how people survive under extreme circumstances. A vivid, memorable depiction of the intersection of individual lives with major events.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rungren, Lawrence. "Savill, David. They Are Trying To Break Your Heart." Library Journal, 1 Jan. 2017, p. 93+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA476562334&it=r&asid=524d6d74da10fc9abcdda7932c0230d3. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A476562334
They Are Trying to Break Your Heart
263.42 (Oct. 17, 2016): p45.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
They Are Trying to Break Your Heart
David Savill. Bloomsbury, $26 (368p) ISBN 978-1-63286-546-5
Savill's immersive debut brings together the Bosnian War of the 1990s and the 2004 Thai tsunami in an enthralling story about destruction and justice. In 2004, Anya is working for a human rights organization in London. Although her organization has shifted its focus from human rights abuses to returning refugees displaced during the Bosnian war, Anya can't stop thinking about a rape of a Bosnian woman by soldiers during the war that was never investigated. Concurrently in Cambridge, Marko, a Bosnian immigrant, is haunted by the same incident and wonders whether his close friend, Kemal, really was guilty of participating in the rape. While investigating those involved in the incident, Anya hears that Kemal may not be dead, as previously reported, but instead living in a resort in Thailand. Combining work with pleasure, she travels to the resort for Christmas 2004 with William, her ex-boyfriend, in hopes of rekindling their romance. Early on, the story flashes back to the '90s in Bosnia, revealing the childhoods of Marko, Kemal, and their friends, and also moves forward to post-tsunami 2005: William is mourning Anya, who died in the tsunami, and Marko is back in Bosnia for Kemal's funeral. This intricate story weaves together disparate threads, jumping among times and locations in a hopscotch that builds suspense toward the revelation of what actually happened in Bosnia. By wedding together multiple story lines into a chaotic, satisfying whole, Savill skillfully depicts the aid workers, perpetrators, victims, and survivors involved in two blurry moments of international crisis. (Dec.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"They Are Trying to Break Your Heart." Publishers Weekly, 17 Oct. 2016, p. 45. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468700001&it=r&asid=08280890c86160ec758424f1ee194402. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468700001
David Savill: THEY ARE TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART
(Oct. 1, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
David Savill THEY ARE TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART Bloomsbury (Adult Fiction) 26.00 ISBN: 978-1-63286-546-5
A literary debut that connects the Bosnian civil war with the Indian Ocean tsunami, two horrific disasters a decade apart. Human rights researcher Anya Teal is trying to hunt down a man named Kemal Lekic 10 years after the 1990s war. She looks at the photo in the obituary that praises him as a war hero and thinks he's "handsome enough she had to remind herself of what he had done," deeds that early on the reader must guess at. Hed been a brigade commander from Stovnik in Bosnia, and hed been presumed killed in a heavy shelling. No one could find his body, and he was buried in an empty casket in 1995. Kemal's best friend, Marko Novak, considers him to be the hero who diedthe only one whose life made any sense of the war. But Anya follows plausible rumors that he survived and is living in Thailand in 2004. Conveniently, her old flame William Howell is an English teacher in Bangkok, and she hopes they can get together again. Anya has studied Bosnia and written a dissertation called Rape as a Weapon of War, and she wonders if Kemal was one of the rapists. Scenes move back and forth from postwar Bosnia to pre- and post-tsunami Thailand; just before the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and massive concertina of energy in the ocean, Anya says to William in Kao Lak: I love that we can hear the sea. Back in Bosnia, Marko thinks, Ive lost my childhood, have you seen it anywhere? That sums up the sense of pointless loss that so many survivors of the Bosnian War must have felt. Little seems to happen in the storys early stages, and the pace overall does not leave the reader breathless. And readers may wonder what a five-page chapter about skateboarding is doing just before the books end, but its entertaining nonetheless. Savills first novel shows his deep compassion for and understanding of two earth-shattering events. Fans of British author William Boyd, take note.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"David Savill: THEY ARE TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA465181961&it=r&asid=a48f0cb9d5f8b3ae105ae48b45e78758. Accessed 1 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A465181961
Former journalist David Savill's fiction debut, ‘They are Trying to Break Your Heart', is searing
"They Are Trying to Break Your Heart" by David Savill
"They Are Trying to Break Your Heart" by David Savill (Bloomsbury)
Melissa Holbrook Pierson
If, as Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1959, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” then things are not going at all well in the parallel lands that are the setting for David Savill’s searing debut novel, “They Are Trying to Break Your Heart.” In its first 100 pages, in scenes in Bosnia during the war from 1992-95, and 10 years later in London and Thailand, terrible cruelties are visited on a variety of animals. The intimation, and soon enough a good deal more, is that they are proxies for the savagery we practice on one another.
Obvious? Yes. And no. Savill, a British journalist who was on the ground both in Bosnia during the war and in Thailand after the Boxing Day tsunami a decade later — the locations of the two disparate disasters his book seeks to conjoin — builds his fictional case on an armature of such height it can be a dizzying climb. But attain the top we do. All thanks to a sheer amazement that compels us upward just to find out how such an intricate structure could have been conceived, much less made.
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No small additional encouragement is the author’s ability to explore moral complexities in lean and evocative prose, with a light hand on the symbolism.
“They descend the hairpins over the valley at Jasenica. The only road barrier is the flickering yellow tape indicating a mined area. The van clatters over the potholes. Vesna says nothing. When they turn onto the Zagreb road, the indicator doesn’t cancel itself, and when he tries to turn it off, it switches in the other direction, then back again, before mysteriously stopping.”
They are on their way to a wartime disaster.
Employing the style of cross-cutting and montage that has become de rigueur for any contemporary novel that pretends to seriousness or currency, the author charts a zigzagging course across time and geography for four main characters who will, of course, come together in the end. Or attempt to, at any rate. If they occasionally resemble elaborately made vessels rather than breathing human beings, the author may be excused: The aim of “They Are Trying to Break Your Heart” is to take on pretty much every one of the Important Subjects. Family, love, responsibility, desire, memory, lust, death and the unspeakable — all these and more are stitched through a plot that ranges across 10 years of time, half a world, and a couple dozen characters.
Borrowing fast cutting from cinema increases the tension in literature too. But before you can worry about any outcome you have to figure out who is who and what what. It’s hard to care when you aren’t quite sure what you’re caring about. Savill has set himself a difficult project at the get-go: introducing the several characters whose lives will enmesh across time and space. There is Anya Teal, researcher for human-rights organization Dignity Monitor (master’s thesis: rape as a war weapon in the Balkan conflicts); date and places of operation, 2004, London and Khao Lak, Thailand. Marko Novak is a Croat whose family, friendships and very youth are torn along the same essentially arbitrary lines as those that ripped apart his country; 1991–95 and 2005, England and Bosnia and Herzegovina. William Howell, Brit and Anya’s former significant other, crops up in 2004 and 2005, before and after the tsunami that in moments swept away the lives of over 230,000 people. The last of these, paradoxically most affecting, is Kemal Lekić, Marko’s best friend, soldier, war hero and war criminal, savior-victim-perpetrator; all this time, everywhere and nowhere.
Premonitions gather. Swimming in the Indian Ocean provides aching foreshadows of loss. As with spices in a recipe, these must be judiciously added, or else the dish is ruined. Savill is a clever cook, if one overly fond of the notion that if nutmeg is good, then some cumin, chile, garlic and pepper will be even better. Savill’s is a mash-up of the international thriller and novel of ideas (he has Marko briefly expound on the history of war in postwar Europe, a march around the continent that sequentially threw whole populations across new borders) and it succeeds measurably in both. His book makes a good case that a search for the guilty party is both the ultimate narrative driver and a terrifically complex concept: it is what we are all running to, or from.
The darkly troubling crime at the heart of the plot is that of rape, the most potent weapon in war’s arsenal. Its casualties are unceasing, radiating. Savill brings a harrowing concreteness to its use, even when it is off-screen: Anya visits a “rape camp” where years before Muslim women had been imprisoned and brutally dehumanized. Now, “Inside the house was a terrible silence” — the silence of those who knew what happened there, and who 10 years later she attempts to make speak. (Its real counterpart, Savill reports in an appendix, is the center of a still unsuccessful effort to make it a memorial. Anya’s aims are true.)
In “They Are Trying to Break Your Heart” Kemal speaks the least, but he says nearly all. A shadowy figure in a chiaroscuro portrait of man’s inhumanity to man, he emerges as most fully human, which is the true tragedy of which Savill writes.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson is a critic and the author of five works of nonfiction.
::
“They Are Trying to Break Your Heart”
By David Savill
Bloomsbury: 368 pp., $27
‘They Are Trying to Break Your Heart’ Lacks Precision, But So Does War
Savill's novel examines issues as expansive as global war and as intricate as human relationships. Such a range is ambitious, but the final result falls short.
by Sara Cutaia
December 16, 2016
Comments 0
trying-to-break-your-heartIn a novel that encompasses decades and continents, lovers and strangers, adoration and loss, David Savill has crafted a story that successfully “breaks your heart.” The characters includes Marko and Kemal, two friends from the Bosnian War of 1994; and Anya and William, two former lovers from 2004 on a Christmas vacation at the Thai beach resort of Koa Lak (yes, that Christmas in Thailand). Though they are separated by time and place, these characters’ fates are intertwined by the force of nature itself.
They Are Trying to Break Your Heart is told in jolting jumps through time. During the 1994 Bosnian War sections, the scenes are written with deft sincerity and thoughtful brutality. There is a tragic sense of belonging to a place that can no longer support you, of longing for home but needing to abandon it. Equally as gripping is Marko and Kemal’s friendship and the extreme grief that follows once Kemal is killed. The chaos of the war is poignant and shocking. Each new glimpse of this war-torn country adds weight of despair to Savill’s pain-filled—but lovely—prose.
When there is a jump in time, we are in 2004 with Anya, a human rights researcher whose investigation of a man with blood on his hands leads her to Thailand. She invites her old love William along with hope of rekindling their relationship. The choices that bring her to Thailand are circumstantial at best, and it is with loose threads that Savill weaves Anya’s story with Kemal’s. I found these sections to pale in comparison to the war depictions. The jumps often pulled me out of the story as I was forced to re-situate myself in time and from different characters’ points-of-view.
Tension runs through most of the novel, which helps to keep the pages turning. And despite the fact that the historical events framing the story—the Bosnian War and the Thailand Christmas tsunami—are real tragedies, the book achieves a growing sense of unease as the characters trek blindly toward their fates. Indeed, the build-up mirrors the way tsunami waves build: slowly and with mighty, overwhelming force.
The novel profoundly examines issues as expansive as global war and as intricate as two humans in a relationship. And the complexity of just-missed opportunities was an access point that I could relate to. However, I felt the novel was reaching for a deeper commentary on the human condition than it successfully achieved by trying to speak to the way in which trauma can meddle with emotions, or how politics can conspire to sabotage love between people.
If all of this seems like too much ground to cover, that’s because it is. The ambition to tell such an encompassing story is admirable, but the final result falls short. The confusion created by multiple perspectives and time jumps is at odds with the novel’s most somber passages. I commend the effort to write a tale about things that are truly important—war, and death, and justice—but I found myself wanting a more precise focus.
FICTION – LITERARY
They Are Trying to Break Your Heart by David Savill
Bloomsbury USA
Published December 6, 2016
ISBN 9781408865774
David Savill is a former journalist. His debut novel is called They Are Trying to Break Your Heart, and his second novel, currently in progress, is called Disinformation. He teaches creative writing at The University of Salford in Manchester.
They Are Trying to Break Your Heart
Image of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart
Author(s):
David Savill
Release Date:
December 5, 2016
Publisher/Imprint:
Bloomsbury USA
Pages:
368
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Cathy Layne
In April 2005 two men on opposite sides of the world are grieving for loved ones who died when the tsunami of December 2004 destroyed a Thai seaside resort. William, a British teacher in Bangkok, lost his ex-girlfriend Anya; Marko, a Bosnian refugee living in the UK, lost his friend Kemal, an older brother figure he had worshiped.
With a story that moves back and forth between London, Bosnia, Thailand, and Cambodia, between the present of 2005 and the events of ten years earlier, told from the points of view of multiple narrators, David Savill uses the natural disaster of the tsunami and the manmade disaster of the Balkans conflict of the 1990s to explore themes of romantic and brotherly love, loss, and redemption.
The choppy narrative, moving from past to present, from place to place, between characters that initially seem unconnected to each other, is at first demanding but ultimately rewarding as the complex story comes together.
Anya, a human rights researcher, has been estranged from her ex-partner William for three years, when he contacts her out of the blue. In need of a holiday, she decides to visit him in Thailand, where he now lives and works. But she has an ulterior motive: in the course of her research work she has heard a rumor that a suspected Bosnian war criminal, accused of raping a woman she has interviewed, is now working at the Thai seaside resort of Kao Lak after having apparently staged his own death ten years earlier:
"Finding facts. It was in her job description. The presentation and analysis of facts. Fact: Kemal Lekić was alive. Fact: Kemal Lekić had been accused of rape, implicated in the disappearance of two women, the abuse of his military role and at least one breach of the Geneva Convention."
Compelled to confront Kemal Lekić herself, she arranges to spend Christmas with William at Kao Lak; William hopes this might be the prelude to them getting back together.
Running alongside this narrative strand is Marko's story: He is shocked to find out that his friend Kemal, whose coffin he had carried to his grave after his apparent death in a bomb blast in Bosnia in 1995, had been living in Thailand and died in the tsunami.
He returns to Bosnia, from the U.K. where he now lives, to attend Kemal's second funeral, filled with conflicting feelings. He is guilty about his love for Kemal's girlfriend, Vesna. He has believed for the last ten years that Kemal's death was his fault; he had sent him on a false rendezvous with Vesna to the square where the bomb that supposedly killed him went off, so that he could meet Vesna himself. He has also heard that this man he once idolized is suspected of war crimes.
Meanwhile, in Bangkok, William is still coming to terms with Anya's death. It seems he may find redemption in his relationship with Missy, an American coworker he has to accompany to Cambodia on a visa run. Missy's down-to-earth presence in his life helps him come to terms with Anya's death, and gives him the courage to finally sort through her possessions. In a work-related file on her computer he finds a photo of Kemal Lekić, a man he remembers vividly from the day of the tsunami.
Back in Bosnia, Marko's cousin Samir tells him the truth about the alleged war crimes Kemal committed.
While the narrative is driven by the two compelling questions of whether Kemal Lekić was innocent or guilty, and whether William will be able to move on after Anya's death, the book is most memorable for its depiction of war-torn Bosnia and its message that the love and friendship between Marko, Kemal, Vesna and their friends and families, can transcend the senselessness of civil war.
In his author's note, Savill says that the novel grew from a desire to capture the "humanity, solidarity and kindness" of his Bosnian friends, and in this he certainly succeeds.
Cathy Layne edits fiction and non fiction across a broad range of genres, specializing in topics of Japanese and Asian interest. She lives in Bangkok where she currently works as a teacher and freelance editor.