Girl at War

(Paperback)

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LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016

Growing up in Zagreb in the summer of 1991, 10-year-old Ana Juric is a carefree tomboy; she runs the streets with her best friend, Luka, helps take care of her baby sister, Rahela, and idolizes her father. But when civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, football games and school lessons are supplanted by sniper fire and air raid drills.

The brutal ethnic cleansing of Croats and Bosnians tragically changes Ana's life, and she is lost to a world of genocide and child soldiers; a daring escape plan to America becomes her only chance for survival. Ten years later she returns to Croatia, a young woman struggling to belong to either country, forced to confront the trauma of her past and rediscover the place that was once her home.

Reviews

Set against the backdrop of the Bosnian Croat war, this vivid debut recalls Half of a Yellow Sun. Main character Ana's journey from a ten-year-old tomboy to young woman will leave you reeling. - Stylist

An unforgettable portrait of how war forever changes the life of the individual, Girl at War is a remarkable debut by a writer working with deep reserves of talent, heart, and mind. - Gary Shteyngart

Girl at War by Sara Novic depicts the still-fresh nightmare of the Serbo-Croatian war, survived by a girl much too young to know all she knows. Sara Novic writes with ruthless understatement not only about a modern city subjected to primitive horrors, but about young Ana's subsequent war against the American urge to forget. Sentence after perfectly-weighted sentence, her prose lands with the sound of a gavel. The first fifty pages might be the best fifty pages you read this year. - Jonathan Dee

Girl at War performs the miracle of making the stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and universal as myth. It is a brutal novel, but a beautiful one - New York Times

Author Bio

Sara Novic was born in 1987 and has lived in the United States and Croatia. She recently graduated from the MFA program at Columbia University, where she studied fiction and translation. She is the fiction editor at Blunderbuss Magazine, and teaches writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology. She lives in Queens, New York.