Bolla

Pajtim Statovci, David Hackston

From Shelf: Dublin Literary Award Longlist 2023

The internationally award-winning novel of passion, war, migration - and a destructive forbidden attraction between two men.

'Devastating in the most beautiful ways . . . you are in the hands of an absolute artist.' TORREY PETERS, author of DETRANSITION, BABYIt is April, 1995. Kosovo is a country on the cusp of a dreadful war. Arsim is twenty-two, newly married, cautious - an Albanian trying to keep his head down and finish his studies in an atmosphere of creeping threat. Until he encounters Milos, a Serb, and begins a life in secret. Bolla is the story of what happens when passion and history collide - when a relationship, already forbidden and laced with danger, is ripped apart by war and migration, separated by nations and fate. What happens when you are forced to live a life that is not yours, so far from your desires? Can the human remain?