Published in 2021 (first published 2016)
240 pages
Ivana Bodrozic was born in Vukovar, Croatia, in 1982, where she lived until the Yugoslav Wars started in 1991. That year her father disappeared while fighting for Croatian independence and she and the rest of her family moved to a refugee hotel in Kumrovec. In 2005, she published her first poetry collection, The First Step into Darkness, and in 2010 her acclaimed and bestselling first novel The Hotel Tito, which won three major awards in Croatia and the Prix Ulysse for Best Debut Novel in France. It was published by Seven Stories in 2017. Since then Bodrozic released her second poetry collection, A Crossing for Wild Animals, and a short story collection, 100% Cotton. We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day is her second novel and her first political thriller.
Ellen Elias-Bursac translates fiction and nonfiction from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. She has taught in the Harvard University Slavic Department and is a contributing editor to Asymptote. Her most recent translation for Seven Stories is Robert Perisic’s novel No-Signal Area. She lives in Boston.
What is this book about?
A thriller of the ex-Yugoslavia Wars.
“Bodrozic, mediated by Ellen Elias-Bursac’s assured translation, chronicles what a country chooses to remember, and what it consciously forgets, with confidence and grace.” —Sarah Weinman, New York Times Book Review
The city of Vukovar, situated on Croatia’s easternmost periphery, across the Danube River from Serbia, was the site of some of the worst violence in the wars that rocked ex-Yugoslavia in the early ’90s. It is referred to only as “the city” throughout this taut political thriller from one of Europe’s most celebrated young writers. In this city without a name, fences in schoolyards separate the children of Serbs from those of Croats, and city leaders still fight to free themselves from violent crimes they committed–or permitted–during the war a generation ago. Now, it is left to a new generation–the children, now grown up, to extricate themselves from this tragic place, innocents who are nonetheless connected in different ways to the crimes of the past.
Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion–a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her students, a Serb, and is now in prison for having murdered her husband. But Nora herself is the daughter of a man who was murdered years earlier under mysterious circumstances. And she wants, if not to avenge her father, at least to bring to justice whoever committed the crime. There’s a hothouse intensity to this extraordinary noir page-turner because of how closely the author sets the novel within the historical record. This city is unnamed, the story is fictional, so it can show us what actually happened there.
