The prize-winning debut novel by the author of Before the Feast
Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina.
When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest heart attack in the world while watching Carl Lewis's record, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition. However when the shadow of war spreads to Višegrad, the world as he knows it stops.
Suddenly it is not important how heavy a spider's life weighs, or why Marko's horse is related to Superman. Suddenly it is important to have the right name and to pretend that the little Muslim girl Asija is his sister. Then Aleksandar's parents decide to flee to Germany and he must leave his new friend behind.
The award-winning novelist Saša Stanišic was born in Višegrad, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone was acclaimed by readers and critics alike, and has been translated into 30 languages so far. Before the Feast, his second novel, won the 2014 Leipzig Book Fair Prize, was longlisted for the German Book Prize, and won the Alfred-Döblin and Hohenemser literary prizes.