Bolla

From the author of Crossing—a National Book Award finalist—comes a dazzling tale full of fury, tenderness, longing, and lust.

April 1995. Arsim is a twenty-two-year-old, recently married student at the University of Pristina, in Kosovo, keeping his head down to gain a university degree in a time and place deeply hostile to Albanians. In a café he meets a young man named Milo, a Serb. Before the day is out, everything has changed for both of them, and within a week two milestones erupt in Arsim’s married life: his wife announces her first pregnancy and he begins a life in secret.
 
After these febrile beginnings, Arsim and Milo’s unlikely affair is derailed by the outbreak of war, which sends Arsim’s fledgling family abroad and timid Milo spiraling down a dark path. Years later, deported back to Pristina after a spell in prison and now alone and hopeless, Arsim finds himself in a broken reality that makes him completely question his past.
 
Entwined with their story is a re-created legend of a demonic serpent, Bolla; it’s an unearthly tale that gives Arsim and Milo a language through which to reflect on what they once had. With luminous prose and a delicate eye, Pajtim Statovci delivers a relentless novel of desire, destruction, intimacy, and the different fronts of war.