4.0
Where You Come From
ByPublisher Description
Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award
A Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus, and Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Month
“Inventive, funny and moving.” ―The New York Times Book Review
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
Winner of the German Book Prize, Saša Stanišic’s inventive and surprising novel asks: What makes us who we are?
In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy’s father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Saša Stanišic’s Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country.
Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons’ den. Translated by Damion Searls, it’s a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.
A Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus, and Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Month
“Inventive, funny and moving.” ―The New York Times Book Review
Translated from the German by Damion Searls
Winner of the German Book Prize, Saša Stanišic’s inventive and surprising novel asks: What makes us who we are?
In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy’s father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Saša Stanišic’s Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country.
Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons’ den. Translated by Damion Searls, it’s a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesWhere You Come From Reviews
4.0
“One of my favourite books of the year, somehow reminded me of Endling. Started reading it in German but for the time efficiency reasons switched to English mid-way.
I have conflicted opinions about this book but considering its theme I’d say it makes much sense. On the one hand I might be taking everything too personally, considering the events that took place in Yugoslavia some years ago and the war back at my home.
I do feel that the author still feels lost. He’s striving to say that it absolutely doesn’t matter where you come from but for me it looks like a self-convincing trick rather than something he truly believes in.
It is a very funny book. But awfully sad one”
About Sasa Stanisic
Saša Stanišic was born in Višegrad (Yugoslavia) in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, was translated into thirty-one languages; Before the Feast was a bestseller and won the renowned Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
Damion Searls is an award-winning translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch,and the author of The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator.
Damion Searls is an award-winning translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch,and the author of The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator.
Other books by Sasa Stanisic
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