Unspeakable Home: A Novel

(Hardback)

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A stunningly original, stylistically brilliant, and brutally honest novel from an award-winning Bosnian refugee and writer who, decades after escaping his war-torn home country looks back on his childhood, imploded relationships, and battles with addictionoffering powerful insight into the human cost of conflict.

Its been two years since our narrator divorced his beloved and lost his safest and most adoring home when he fled Bosnia as a teenager. The marriage couldnt survive his brokenness, the trauma so entrenched and insidious that it became impossible to communicate to anyone outside of himselfeven the person he loved most. But, as he writes in the first of many courageously candid fan letters to the comedian Bill Burr, he knows he must try.

A linguistically adventurous, structurally ambitious, and emotionally brave odyssey, Unspeakable Home takes us through the memories and confessions of our refugee narrator as he reflects on his bomb-ravaged childhood, the implosion of his relationships, and an agonizing battle with alcoholism. As multiple narrators surface in fragments with increasingly tenuous connections to reality, Prcic unearths the psychological cost of exile and shame with a roving, kinetic energy and a sharp, searching sense of humor. What emerges is a vivid and poignant exploration of the stories we create to hide the deepest parts of our identity from ourselves, as well as a hard-won, life-affirming promise of redemption.

Reviews

"Unspeakable Home is fierce and unforgettable, forged in the heart. It is a darkly funny, surprising, and sad accounting of the Bosnia that broke the refugee-narrator, and of the phantom actor he became on the California set. Home, love, selfPrcic, the drinker, puts a match to it all in scorching scenes that sear the eyes. And still, there is promise of return." Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood

Reading Unspeakable Homeis humbling, unnerving, and reading it also gives audition to a voice that might otherwise be screaming alone. A novel as powerful as Last Exit to Brooklynand as necessary, with a manifold character who refuses 'the chaos of anonymity or silence.' A brilliant and deadly serious comic novel." Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow and She

Selected Praise for Shards

Impressive . . . Inventive . . . Pushes against convention, logic, chronology . . . Ambitious and deep . . . [Prcic] succeeds at writing an unsettling and powerful novel. Dana Spiotta,New York Times Book Review

Irresistible . . . Fierce, funny, and real. Teresa Budasi,Chicago Sun-Times

So gripping and shaking that there will be no casual readers of this book. Y. S. Fing,Washington Independent Review of Books

Brilliant . . . With verbal glee, Prcic serves up a darkly comic vision of the terrors and misunderstandings of immigration. Tight, glorious little tales-within-tales abound, rattled off with a quick, artless naturalism. . . . The writing is packed with one original metaphor after another, language thats almost drunk with colorful, startling images. . . . Brimming with scraps of memory, regrets, and rationalizations,Shardsleaves an indelible scar on the readers imagination. Prcic has pieced together a young mans story from the torn and exploded remains of his former life, and the sheer power of his language leaves the reader shaken. Nick DiMartino, Shelf Awareness

Powerful, gorgeous writingcomplicated without a hint of intellectual grandstanding. This novel is a difficult treasure. Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Awards Committee

Prcic captures the insanity of war and its unceasing aftermath. Publishers Weekly

Brutally vivid . . .Shards[rings] true. Emily Harris,The Oregonian

A playful but heartfelt debut . . . Brightly detailed . . . [Prcic is] a spirited, soulful talent. Kirkus Reviews

The experience of readingShardsthe deliberate disorientation, the layering and morphing of events that characterize the bookreveals in a more visceral way what it might be like to live always with a full awareness of the tenuousness of civil society, of the terrible precariousness of calm. Margaux Wexberg Sanchez,St. Louis Beacon

Author Bio

Ismet Prcic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1977 and immigrated to America in 1996. His first novel,Shards,was aNew York TimesNotable Book, aChicago Sun-TimesBest Book of the Year, as well as the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize and theLos Angeles TimesArt Seidenbaum Award for first fiction.