Join our Fiction Book Club in a monthly meeting to discuss a wide array of literary fiction. With an eclectic mix of authors, themes, periods, and styles, this group will explore both classic and contemporary literature. This year we are dedicating our discussions to literature translated from around the world! For questions about this book club, email Matt at matt@unabridgedbookstore.com.
The Fiction Book Club will meet to discuss Where You Come From by Saša Stanišic, translated by Damion Searls on Wednesday, November 9th, 2021 at 7:30pm.
Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award, A Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus, and Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Month
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.
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.
