The Cellist of Sarajevo
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4.2 • 19 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The Cellist of Sarajevo provides a glimpse of the human spirit that even war cannot extinguish.
Sarajevo is under siege.
As mortars fall and snipers stalk the city’s abandoned buildings, a cellist sits at his window playing Albinoni’s Adagio. Then a bomb kills twenty-two people in the street below.
For the next twenty-two days he will carry his cello into the cratered street below and play the Adagio in memory of the dead.
Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo imagines these twenty-two days through the eyes of three inhabitants of the city as they struggle with the physical and emotional brutality of war.
‘Though the setting is the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, this gripping novel transcends time and place. It is a universal story, and a testimony to the struggle to find meaning, grace, and humanity, even amid the most unimaginable horrors.’ Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian Galloway (Ascension) delivers a tense and haunting novel following four people trying to survive war-torn Sarajevo. After a mortar attack kills 22 people waiting in line to buy bread, an unnamed cellist vows to play at the point of impact for 22 days. Meanwhile, Arrow, a young woman sniper, picks off soldiers; Kenan makes a dangerous trek to get water for his family; and Dragan, who sent his wife and son out of the city at the start of the war, works at a bakery and trades bread in exchange for shelter. Arrow's assigned to protect the cellist, but when she's eventually ordered to commit a different kind of killing, she must decide who she is and why she kills. Dragan believes he can protect himself through isolation, but that changes when he runs into a friend of his wife's attempting to cross a street targeted by snipers. Kenan is repeatedly challenged by his fear and a cantankerous neighbor. All the while, the cellist continues to play. With wonderfully drawn characters and a stripped-down narrative, Galloway brings to life a distant conflict.
