Judith Flanders reviews Stephen Galloway’s novel about the siege of Sarajevo
Many novels about war deal with the horrors of the front line, of the terrors of battle. Steven Galloway, in this accomplished, gripping book, instead explores what happens to people who are caught up between warring factions. What happens when you wake up one morning and find that everything in your safe, ordinary, middle-class life has just vanished without warning.
A small, true incident during the siege of Sarajevo is his starting point. In a day of death and horror like any other, a mortar shell fell on a group of men and women waiting outside a bakery — a bakery without bread but where the hope of bread was enough to draw a crowd. Twenty-two were killed and many dozens more wounded.
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