Where You Come From by Sasa Stanisic
- Sale Date
- ISBN
- 9781951142834
- Page Count
- 364
- Language
- English
- Imprint
- Tin House
Meet the Author
Sasa Stanisic
Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award
A Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus, and Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Month
“Inventive, funny and moving.” ―The New York Times Book Review
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
Winner of the German Book Prize, Saša Stanišic’s inventive and surprising novel asks: What makes us who we are?
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. Saša Stanišic’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.
A Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus, and Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Month
“Inventive, funny and moving.” ―The New York Times Book Review
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
Winner of the German Book Prize, Saša Stanišic’s inventive and surprising novel asks: What makes us who we are?
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. Saša Stanišic’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.
Praise for Where You Come From
-
“Inventive, funny and moving. . . . Damion Searls’s translation does justice to Stanišic’s dry wit and linguistic playfulness, and captures the tense undercurrents building throughout the book.”
The New York Times Book Review -
“Charming. . . . This realistic portrayal of refugees will engender compassion with its humor and subtlety.”
The Washington Post -
“[Saša Stanišic is] a Bosnian-German wunderkind whose gripping tale about a refugee family marries formal experimentation and deadpan humor amid the suffocating smoke of survivors’ guilt.”
Oprah Daily
About the Imprint
Where the literary canon of tomorrow is born. Critically acclaimed titles that challenge, illuminate, and linger. Discover award-winning fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from emerging voices you’ll say you found first.
