Books by Aleksandar Hemon

A combined book of two magnificent works by Aleksandar Hemon, presented together in a reversible single edition: the story of his parents' emigration from Sarajevo, and a book of short memories of the author's family, friends and childhood.

'A raucous, hilarious book . . . deadly funny.' Chicago MagazineScript idea #142: Aliens undercover as cabbies abduct the fiancee of the main character, who has to find a way to a remote planet to save her. Title: Love Trek.Script idea #185: Teenager discovers his girlfriend's beloved grandfather was a guard in a Nazi death camp. The boy's grandparents are survivors, but he's tantalizingly close to achieving deflowerment, so when a Nazi-hunter arrives in town in pursuit of Grandpa, he has to distract him long enough to get laid. A riotous Holocaust comedy. Title: The Righteous Love.Script idea #196: Rock star high out of his mind freaks out during a show, runs offstage, and is lost in streets crowded with his hallucinations. The teenage fan who finds him keeps the rock star for himself for the night. Mishaps and adventures follow. This one could be a musical: Singin' in the Brain.Josh Levin is an aspiring screenwriter teaching ESL classes in Chicago. His laptop is full of ideas, but the only one to really take root is Zombie Wars. When Josh comes home to discover his landlord, an unhinged army vet, rifling through his dirty laundry, he decides to move in with his girlfriend, Kimmy. It's domestic bliss for a moment, but Josh becomes entangled with a student, a Bosnian woman named Ana, whose husband is jealous and violent. Disaster ensues, and as Josh's choices move from silly to profoundly absurd, Aleksandar Hemon's The Making of Zombie Wars takes on real consequence.

Aleksandar Hemon grew up in a blissful Sarajevo, where his childhood was consumed by football, his adolescence by friends, movies and girls and where, as a young man, he poked at the pretensions of his beloved city with American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism. And then at twenty-seven Hemon flew to Chicago for a month-long visit. A matter of weeks later Sarajevo was engulfed in an atrocious war and Hemon found himself an exile - he wouldn't return home for five years, and when he did, he found his city irrevocably changed.

'If there is a more inspired writer of fiction than Aleksandar Hemon currently at work in English, I haven't read him. Startlingly fresh and original . . . Read and rejoice' GQ The explosive perils of adolescence, a country falling apart, the overwhelming vertigo of striking out abroad: this is life in which love is only one of many obstacles. From Sarajevo to the darkest heart of Africa, deepest Slovenia, and the melting pot of Chicago, this brilliant and restlessly inventive collection is shot through with humour and truth - found in the most surprising of places. 'Eccentric, witty and alive with compassion' Observer 'Much of the wonder here is in his swaggeringly supple prose, which is by turns delectably lavish and blunt . . . Some of the richest delights in contemporary fiction, as well as some of the best jokes' Guardian 'Crackles with wit and dances with invention' Independent 'Infinitely vibrant and alive' Financial Times

'Aleksandar Hemon has established himself as that rare thing, an essential writer. Another small act of defiance against this narrowing world' Observer 'His language sings . . . I should not be surprised if Hemon wins the Nobel Prize at some point' Giles Foden In Aleksandar Hemon's electrifying first book, The Question of Bruno, Jozef Pronek left Sarajevo to visit Chicago in 1992, just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Unable to return, he began to make his way in a foreign land and his adventures were unforgettable. Now Pronek, the accidental nomad, gets his own book, and startles us into yet more exhilarating ways of seeing the world anew. 'If the plot is mercury, quick and elusive, sentence by sentence and word for word, Aleksandar Hemon's writing is gold' Times Literary Supplement 'Downbeat but also hilarious, while the writing itself is astonishing' Time Out 'Hemon can't write a boring sentence, and the English language is the richer for it' New York Times 'Sheer exuberance, generosity and engagement with life' Sunday TimesIn Aleksandar Hemon's electrifying first book, The Question of Bruno, Jozef Pronek left Sarajevo to visit Chicago in 1992, just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Unable to return, he began to make his way in a foreign land and his adventures were unforgettable. Now Pronek, the accidental nomad, gets his own book, and startles us into yet more exhilarating ways of seeing the world anew.

'You will go a long way to find anything better than this' Edward Docx 'There is simply more history and more drama in Hemon's stories than in a shelf and a half of the usual dayglo Anglo-American entertainment' Guardian The Question of Bruno is an elegy for the vanished Yugoslavia and a journey through the intertwined history of a family and a nation, written in prose of unparalleled daring, invention and wit. 'Amazing. The personal fall-out of political failure has never been so searing' Time Out 'Like Nabokov, Hemon writes with the startling peeled vision of the outsider, weighing words as if for the first time; he shares with Kundera an ability to find grace and humour in the bleakest of circumstances' Observer 'A storyteller, funny and sad in equal measure, and always entertaining' Scotland on SundayThe Question of Bruno is an elegy for the vanished Yugoslavia and a journey through the intertwined history of a family and a nation, written in prose of unparalleled daring, invention and wit.