Infidelities

Novakovich's stories follow ordinary people and soldiers swept up in the wars that tore apart the former Yugoslavia. Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Muslim forces fight through towns and farmland, and the line between battlefield and home is hard to find. Soldiers and civilians alike are trapped in war's absurd and sometimes cruel twists, and in the self-importance and blunders of the people directing it. The collection opens with a Croatian mother who sleeps with a draft officer to keep her son out of the army, an affair that brings her an unsettling spiritual experience. Another story centres on a Buddhist soldier in the Bosnian Muslim army who is falsely suspected of informing for the Serbs after his unit ambushes itself. A draft dodger awaiting a transplant suddenly finds a new hunger for life, and a Bosnian émigré in America discovers that passion cannot free her from memories of home.

The stories range across a wide span of history, from the first shots of the First World War in Sarajevo to the lives of Balkan immigrants in contemporary America. Compassion, dark humour and desire keep appearing in a landscape wrecked by tragedy, giving the book its mix of comedy and grief.