Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Presenter of
the National Book Awards
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Saša Stanišić was born in Višegrad (Yugoslavia) in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, was translated into 31 languages; Before the Feast was a bestseller and won the renowned Leipzig Book Fair Prize. More about this author >
Damion Searls is an award-winning translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, and the author of The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator. More about this author >
Filed in the following archives
Translated from the German.
From the publisher:
In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy’s father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Saša Stanišic’s Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country.
Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons’ den. Translated by Damion Searls, it’s a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.
