From the author of Crossing--a National Book Award finalist--comes a dazzling tale full of fury, tenderness, war, and sex.
April 1995. Arsim is a twenty-two-year-old, recently-married student at the University of Pristina, keeping his head down to gain a university degree in a time and place deeply hostile to Albanians. In a café he meets a young man named Miloš, a Serb. Before the day is out, everything has changed for both of them, and within a week two milestones erupt in Arsim's married life: his wife announces her first pregnancy, and he begins a life in secret.
After these febrile beginnings, Arsim and Milo's unlikely affair is derailed by the outbreak of war, which sends Arsim's fledgling family abroad and the sensitive Milo spiraling down a dark path. Years later, deported back to Pristina after a spell in prison, Arsim, alone and hopeless, finds himself in a broken reality that completely questions his past.
Entwined with their story is a recreated legend of a demonic serpent, Bolla: an unearthly tale that gives Arsim and Milo; a language through which to reflect what they once had. With luminous prose and a brilliant eye, Statovci delivers a relentless novel of desire, destruction, intimacy, and the different fronts of war.
