First published 2024
Sarajevo, spring 1992. Zora watches nationalist gangs build barricades each night, dividing her city along ethnic lines. Every morning, Muslim, Croat, and Serb neighbors tear down these barriers together. When real violence erupts, Zora makes a choice. She sends her husband and elderly mother to join their daughter in England but stays behind herself. She believes the fighting will end within weeks. The city falls under siege instead. Bombs destroy everything Zora loves. Black ash drifts over rooftops where homes once stood. Survival means reinventing herself again and again. Her friends face the same brutal necessity. Together they discover what remains when everything familiar disappears. This is their story of breakdown and rebuilding, of finding hope inside destruction.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, war, 21st-century
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, survival
Setting: Sarajevo
Period: 1992
288 pages · Hardcover · Knopf
Content warnings: violence, war