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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
March 2013
On Sale: March 19, 2013
224 pages
ISBN: 0374115737
EAN: 9780374115739
Kindle: B0096M6MVO
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Aleksandar Hemon’s lives begin in Sarajevo, a small,
blissful city where a young boy’s life is consumed with
street soccer with the neighborhood kids, resentment of his
younger sister, and trips abroad with his
engineer-cum-beekeeper father. Here, a young man’s life is
about poking at the pretensions of the city’s elders with
American music, bad poetry, and slightly better journalism.
And then, his life in Chicago: watching from afar as war
breaks out in Sarajevo and the city comes under siege, no
way to return home; his parents and sister fleeing Sarajevo
with the family dog, leaving behind all else they had ever
known; and Hemon himself starting a new life, his own
family, in this new
city.
And yet this is not really a memoir. The Book of
My Lives, Hemon’s first book of nonfiction, defies
convention and expectation. It is a love song to two
different cities; it is a heartbreaking paean to the bonds
of family; it is a stirring exhortation to go out and play
soccer—and not for the exercise. It is a book driven by
passions but built on fierce intelligence, devastating
experience, and sharp insight. And like the best narratives,
it is a book that will leave you a different reader—a
different person, with a new way of looking at the
world—when you’ve finished. For fans of Hemon’s fiction,
The Book of My Lives is simply indispensable; for the
uninitiated, it is the perfect introduction to one of the
great writers of our time.
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