The Question of Bruno

Set in Chicago and Bosnia, this novel is 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. Aleksandar Hemon moved to the U.S. from Bosnia in the early 1990s, prior to the siege of Sarajevo. He swiftly learned English and began writing, in his adopted language, stories about the traumas of immigrant experience and the pain of witnessing the war from his American exile. His impressive debut, The Question of Bruno, may lack the fluency and imaginative ?lan of Kundera and the linguistic density and sophistication of Conrad (both of whom Hemon specifically invokes), yet these stories have a haunting power that lingers long after a first reading.