The Book of My Lives
Farrar Straus & Giroux
Available: 03/19/13
6.28 x 8.65 · 224 pages
9780374115739
CDN $29.00
· cl
With dust jacket
Buy the Book
+ Amazon.ca
+ Chapters.Indigo.ca
+ Independent Retailers
A Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
For fans of Aleksandar 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.
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.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of 2013
Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and three books of short stories: The Question of Bruno ; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles . He was the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and a genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, and the 2020 Dos Passos Prize. He lives in Chicago.