The Longest Winter

We have become conditioned to news reports of war. There is always war being waged and perhaps we now just accept what we hear without really understanding what it must be like to live in areas where there is conflict and death round every corner. Sarajevo in 1992 was one such place. A doctor is on a mercy mission to evacuate a badly injured boy.

We glimpse the lives of local people struggling to survive and dodging bullets and mortar fire on a daily basis. Everybody has lost friends and family members to the war but they attempt to carry on as if everything was normal. But it is far from normal and as this story plays out we enter into the struggle with them.

This book is a window into the conflict and balances well the everyday with war. I found the details of the journalists weak but felt I had experienced life in war torn Sarajevo and will now interpret press reports of war with a little more understanding.

Reccomended.

This is a novel based around events in war-torn Sarajevo. I am ashamed to say that many of our book group (including myself) felt that our knowledge of these events was sadly lacking and, from that point of view, the book was very informative. However, it was far more than that. Not only was it a gripping, well-written story, I strongly suspect it was a frighteningly realistic account of what everyday life is like in a war zone. Quite frankly, I can’t even begin to imagine how I would cope if I was thrown into the same situation – constantly living in fear, losing loved ones on an almost daily basis and surviving on what we would consider to be subsistence levels of all the basic commodities that we take so much for granted.

It is explained at the beginning of the book that, for the purposes of the narrative, two real events which actually happened weeks apart have been condensed into the same time frame. Other than that I can only assume that the author is portraying life as it really was during those harrowing times.

The only problem I had with the book (and it was a minor one, but I was not alone) was that I seemed to be constantly muddling up the characters. I’m not sure if this was because there were quite a lot of characters to come to terms with or because many of their names were unfamiliar to me. In actual fact, I suspect that the most likely explanation is the way in which the book is formatted. It jumped around quite a lot, which could be quite confusing as each chapter contained one storyline, the narrative of which would then be resumed in a later chapter. Intervening chapters contained different, but interconnected storylines and I often found myself having to take a break at the beginning of a chapter to review the current status of that particular situation. During the book group discussion it became apparent that other people had exactly the same problem.

We all agreed that we would thoroughly recommend this book for many reasons. It is a great story with a well constructed plot, it is a page-turner and a good read. For me personally it took me out of my comfort zone into the realities of what it is really like to live through a war. Lastly if, like many of us, you missed out on much of the Balkan conflict at the time when it was happening, this will fill in some of the gaps.