Critic Reviews
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In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy's father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Sasa Stanisic's Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country.
Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons' den. Translated by Damion Searls, it's a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.
Sasa Stanisic was born in Visegrad (Yugoslavia) in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, was translated into thirty-one languages; Before the Feast was a bestseller and won the renowned Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
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Where You Come From, by Saša Stanišić, tr. Damion Searls. Where You Come From is a novel about a village where only 13 people remain, a country that no longer exists, a shattered family that is his own. Winner, German Book Prize, 2019 Longlisted for the #DublinLitAward, 2023 https://t.co/xI3Qflyt40
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Where You Come From by Saša Stanišić (trans. Damion Searls) was nominated by both @stabi_bremen & Stadtbücherei Heidelberg. Here's one of our friends in Bremen to tell us about it! @DubCityCouncil @dubcilib @DublinCityofLit @GI_Irland @JonathanCape #DublinLitAward https://t.co/vXl39CbQ7G
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The longlist for @DublinLitAward includes two German novels in translation: Saša Stanišić's "Where You Come From" and Katja Oskamp's "Marzahn Mon Amour". Click on the link below to read the English translations with our digital library, Onleihe. https://t.co/jT1RNOYOnk https://t.co/PSQnLXMIOR