Question of Bruno
Hemon, Aleksandar

RRP
A$18.99

A collection of stories about love, war, espionage and beekeeping. "The Question of Bruno" is set in Chicago and Bosnia. It is a book about the desolation of war, and how an exile makes a new life in a new land. Its themes range from the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand to the art of dodging sniper fire in a modern city under siege; from the Sarajevo Olympics to the Napoleonic Wars. Whether Hemon is writing of a small boy in communist Yugoslavia who believes his father is a spy, or of a Bosnian immigrant in America sacked from a diner for an inability to distinguish between romaine and iceberg lettuce, he is both painfully funny and heartbreakingly sad. He writes with a wit and elegance and lightness of touch that will ensure him a place alongside Nabokov and Kundera. "The Question of Bruno" is an elegy for the vanished Yugoslavia and a dazzling journey through the intertwined history of a family and a nation, written in prose of unparalleled daring, invention and wit. Aleksandar Hemon is from Sarajevo, emigrated to the United States at the beginning of the war and started writing fiction in English, his second language, two years later. His astonishing debut received huge and enormously positive coverage on hardback publication, and has sold 7000 copies to date.

Author Information

Aleksandar Hemon was born in Sarajevo in 1964 and emigrated to Chicago in 1992. He has been writing fiction in English, his second language, since 1995. He supports Liverpool FC, but still cannot bring himself to hate Manchester United.