Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Shards

Shards

Prcic, Ismet

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Publisher Price: $20.00

ISBN10: 0802170811
ISBN13: 9780802170811
Publisher: Grove Press, Black Cat
Published: Oct 4 2011
Pages: 416
Weight: 0.83
Height: 1.13 Width: 5.59 Depth: 8.22
Language: English
Awards: Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, L.A. Times Book Prize, Oregon Book Awards, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award
Ismet Prcic's brilliant, provocative, and propulsively energetic debut is about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled his war-torn homeland and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California.

He is advised that in order to make peace with the corrosive guilt he harbors over leaving behind his family behind, he must write everything. The result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions: sweetly humorous recollections of Ismet's childhood in Tuzla appear alongside anguished letters to his mother about the challenges of life in this new world. As Ismet's foothold in the present falls away, his writings are further complicated by stories from the point of view of another young man--real or imagined--named Mustafa, who joined a troop of elite soldiers and stayed in Bosnia to fight. When Mustafa's story begins to overshadow Ismet's new-world identity, the reader is charged with piecing together the fragments of a life that has become eerily unrecognizable, even to the one living it.

Shards is a thrilling read--a harrowing war story, a stunningly inventive coming of age, and a heartbreaking saga of a splintered family.

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