A Book about Una. A post-war novel

Farouk Šehić

Mustafa Husar is a former soldier and novice poet. As a result of what he experienced and saw during the war, he now has bipolar disorder in peacetime, and as soon as he manages to gather the broken fragments of his life together, as everything falls apart again: into memories of a country that no longer exists, war and death. He seeks salvation and escape from the confusing labyrinth of his mind in writing. So he returns to the shore of his childhood, to the banks of the River Una in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to his grandmother’s house. And so he — year after year, fish after fish, drop by drop — lives through, scrolls his life again, from the beginning until now. For this book, the author was awarded the Meša Selimović prize in 2011 and the European Union Prize for Literature in 2013.