The Cellist of Sarajevo

This brilliant novel with universal resonance, set during the 1990s Siege of Sarajevo, tells the story of three people trying to survive in a city rife with the extreme fear of desperate times, and of the sorrowing cellist who plays undaunted in their midst.

The cellist is watching from the window of his apartment when a shell explodes one day, killing twenty-two people in a bread queue. He makes a commitment to play Albinoni's Adagio once a day for each of the twenty-two fatalities while sitting in the hole where the mortar landed. The Adagio had been re-created from a fragment after the only extant score was firebombed in the Dresden Music Library, but the fact that it had been rebuilt by a different composer into something new and worthwhile gives the cellist hope.

While this is going on, Dragan, a stranger to Kenan, attempts to find his way to the location of the free supper he knows is waiting, and Kenan braces himself for his weekly trip through the treacherous streets to get water for his family on the other side of town. Fear has almost frozen both guys; they don't know when the next bullet would strike the streets or bridges they must travel or chat to their old acquaintances about life before divisions were unleashed on their city. Then there is "Arrow," a female sniper with exceptional skill who goes by a pseudonym. She is instructed to shield the cellist, who is playing a tribute to the deaths, from a concealed gunman who wants to murder him.

Steven Galloway has made an incredible creative leap in this lovely and enduring book to tell a tale that profoundly speaks to the kindness and dignity of the human spirit in the face of extreme hardship.