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THE WORLD AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS
By: Aleksandar Hemon
A Novel
MCD
February 2023
On Sale: January 24, 2023
Featuring: Archduke Franz Ferdinand; Rafael Pinto
352 pages
ISBN: 0374287708
EAN: 9780374287702
Kindle: B09Y463S7S
Hardcover / e-Book
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Trade Paperback (reprint - March 2024)
Saga | Mystery
As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can’t put in perspective.
And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller; Pinto’s protector and lover.
Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, tangle with spies and Bolsheviks. Over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman—with the occasional opiatic interlude—that keeps him going.
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