Homecoming

A Muslim soldier returns to his village at the end of the Bosnian War in Natasha Radojcic-Kane's bitter, stunning debut, Homecoming. The novel's rare, unvarnished portrait of village life and its inexorable march toward a grim showdown make it worthy of comparison to Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. But Radojcic-Kane fosters a sense of existential despair that clearly situates her story in the Eastern European tradition. Halid, her protagonist, a golden boy tormented by a crime he committed as a soldier, spends three days wandering the streets of his village, unwilling to go home and sinking ever further into a morass of old and new grievances. The physical and moral decay of the village and its inhabitants are the mirror of his own terrible fall from grace.