The majestic Una river becomes a metaphor for life – and death – in this delicate, haunting novel by a veteran of the Bosnian war… vivid, recurring and at times fantastical.
EILEEN BATTERSBY | THE IRISH TIMES
…the Una of the mind flows on with its submerged treasures, shining in the darkness from which its author has salvaged it. Through his exploration of war and peace, innocence and grief, Šehić has composed a humbling meditation on an existential conundrum that is central to collective and private trauma, but also to more ordinary human experience: how to keep the inner self whole in a world that will assault it in unimaginable ways.
KAPKA KASSABOVA | BOOK OF THE DAY IN THE GUARDIAN
It’s hard to catalog the many ways this work satisfies. There is its intellectual rigor—with generous reference points in modern and contemporary film, literature, music, and philosophy, placing events insistently within our larger, shared culture—as well as the prose’s generally uncompromising tenor itself. There is its psychological rigor, restraining any impulse to moral superiority. There is the sheer compression and innovation, pushing this narrative into folds of continually greater nuance and delight—and make no mistake, this is a work flooded with delight…’
ANDREW SINGER | WORLD LITERATURE TODAY
… an insistent, engaging tale – a celebration of the simple pleasures of childhood, a memorial to the many towns of the region that have been reduced to rubble twice over, and an intimate portrait of a war that pitted neighbour against neighbour, divided along ethnic and religious lines.
JOE SCHREIBER | ROUGHGHOSTS
To truly appreciate this writing you have to abandon, so I found anyway, ideas of what you are reading, (is it poetry, fiction, a memoir, a factual account, a dream?) allow yourself to be carried by the current. And you don’t know where it will take you and you won’t always feel comfortable with who you meet, or where you go. But that’s part of the lure of any journey isn’t it? Šehić hasn’t just written about a river. He draws the reader in and it’s the way of water to merge and join, to erase boundaries, so that you too become part of the river and part of his world.
MORELLE SMITH | RIVERTRAIN
This is a poetic, lyrical, dreamlike, novel. It pulls a reader under, bashes them around the head with glorious nature imagery juxtaposed with wartime horror. It tells a reader about a man who has seen horror but doesn’t want to live in it, who has lived amongst ruins and seen the reconstruction of a place that exists, still, as ruins in his mind.
SCOTT MANLEY HADLEY |OPEN PEN MAGAZINE
‘Houses will be destroyed and rebuilt, while the river Una keeps on flowing. So does Šehić’s stream of consciousness, and thanks to these elemental, indestructible words of his, we have it here.
CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPEAN LONDON REVIEW
Fiction can’t capture the true reality of war, this novel suggests; but it can create a proxy in words, a space to confront something of that reality.
DAVID HEBBLETHWAITE | DAVID'S BOOK WORLD
