Cellist of Sarajevo

A beautiful and quick read; condenses the 3 year siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s into a month of fiction. True stories inspire main plot points, like the cellist who watches 22 of his friends and neighbors die when a shell lands on them whilst waiting in a line for bread. To recover from this shock, he plays a beautiful sonata on the spot of the massacre, for 22 days. A talented sniper, Arrow, is assigned to protect the cellist from enemy snipers, and she does her job then gets mixed up in a power struggle with the defendants. Instead of killing her pursuers (as she had the opportunity to do), Arrow decides to meet her fate head on and is blasted to death by their bullets. Two other story lines make up the rest of the fabric, that of Kenan, a father out to gather water for his family, and Dragan, an older man trying to get to the bakery where he works, for his free meal. The mere act of crossing an intersection becomes a nerve-wracking ordeal, as snipers kill civilians at will.

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Reco'd by Tom Peters