1. Island of missing trees, Elif Safak
Cyprus, 1974. Two teenagers – Kostas, Greek and Christian, and Defne, Turkish and Muslim, are on opposite sides of a divided country. The only place where they can meet is the tavern Sretna smokva , hidden under its sooty beams from which hang garlands of garlic, chili peppers and wild herbs.
In the middle of the tavern, twisting through a hole in the roof, is a magnificent fig tree. She will witness the hushed, happy meetings and quiet, secret partings of the young couple; and when the war breaks out, when the capital turns into ruins and when people from the island disappear without a trace, and their parting.
Years later, sixteen-year-old Ada Kazantzakis lives in London and has never visited the island where her parents were born. The only link he has with their homeland is the Ficus carica that grows in the garden of their house. While Ada tries to shed light on her family's dark shadows, the fig tree faces the coldest start to winter in decades.
2. 40 rules of love, Elif Safak
The novel Forty Rules of Love follows Ella Rubinstein, an American, as she explores her life and the concept of love through the life of the famous Sufi and poet Rumi.
Discover the forty rules of love...
Ella Rubinstein has a husband, three teenage children and a cozy home. All this should bring her peace and happiness. Yet there is a void in her life - a void that was once filled with love. Reading Sweet Blasphemy , a manuscript by Aziz A. Zahara about the thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi and the Tabriz dervish Shams, Ella becomes enamored with Shams' rules about life and love, and her world is turned upside down. She embarks on a journey to meet the mysterious author of this work. That quest is imbued with true spirituality and lyrics, and takes Ella to an unusual world where faith and love are painfully explored...
3. Grebo, short biography, Boro Kontić
This was supposed to be a book of interviews. A long, life-long interview in which Professor Zdravko Grebo talks about his family, his university career, his experience as a politician, the war, his successes and defeats, his public engagement, the fate of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the cities that have marked it. From Mostar, through Belgrade, to Sarajevo.
When we started that conversation, which he resisted for a long time, we thought there was time. Unfortunately, it ended after only a few months of work, at the end of 2018. Everything we did then is on the pages of this book.
The professor's archive was left to me. From these documents and memories, I tried to write out a chronology from 1968, when he entered the local public with a bang as a twenty-year-old, his university career, his short but memorable episodes as a Yugoslav politician, the siege of Sarajevo, post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, in short – half a century of a full human life.
This is not a definitive biography. More likely, one of the possible narratives about Professor Zdravko Greba. However, there is one common thread. Whenever this was a space of dramatic events, and there was no shortage of them, one and the same question circulated:
What does Grebo say?
Boro Kontic
4. The fourth violin, Saša Savić
"I also had the opportunity and privilege to read several versions of The Fourth Violin - from the early one to the final one. Each time Savić would add or change something in accordance with his narrative instinct (and only a few of my novelist's tips) which was not at all weakened when he found himself faced with written and unwritten pages. Savić is one of the most intelligent and witty people I know, but the talented novelist in him is a new revelation to me. The same. so, as someone whose initial part of the process of writing a novel is to answer from writing a novel, knowing what all needs to be done, and how much time and doubt and ideas need to be invested, I was impressed from the very beginning by the fact that he decided on this adventure at the age of fifty-five, and that he had enough confidence, courage and strength to work on the book persistently and see it through to a spectacularly successful conclusion."
Alexander Hemon
5. Nights of the Plague, Orhan Pamuk
When an epidemic of plague broke out in the spring of 1901 on the island of Minger, the twenty-ninth vilayet of the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdulhamid first sent the chief sanitary inspector, chemist Bonkowski Pasha, and then the young and successful doctor Nuri, to stop the epidemic. Shortly before that, the Padishah married the young doctor to Sultania Pakiza, the daughter of his older brother Murat V, whom he kept prisoner at court, so she and her husband are also going on that journey. On the island are the young and nationally conscious Ottoman officer kulag Kamil and the girl from the island, his beloved Zejneb, and the valya Sami Pasha and his beautiful lover Marika.
The novel Nights of the Plague is a story about the love and struggle of people dedicated to implementing epidemiological measures, with the plague, customs and traditions on the island, and ultimately – their struggle with each other in an effort to survive.
This exciting political and romantic, but also historical novel, in which Pamuk skilfully questions the epidemic, quarantine, the state and the individual, touches our age with its theme.
6. Adrenaline, Zlatan Ibrahimović
"This is not the gospel about one god, but the diary of a forty-year-old man who reckons with his past, and looks the future straight in the eyes, as if it were another opponent he had to face."
What do scissors represent to a player who is responsible for the most beautiful and exciting in the history of football? What is the value of a goal today for a player who is celebrating his 40th birthday and is still at full strength and actively playing? What do dribbles or passes represent for him? Zlatan Ibrahimović no longer needs to show his strength or remind us of the great sporting successes that made him a champion, and therefore decides to bare his face, in a sincere and honest way, to tell us how the football god is changing and facing the years to come: without hypocrisy, but with the maturity and doubts that he had to learn and accept. In a constant balance between adrenaline and balance , a story full of unknown details and anecdotes is revealed, where even fear finds space in the folds of a champion, along with tenderness and fragility, feelings that contribute to strength, determination and courage. He brought the boy from Rosengård to the top of the world, from where he now tells us about coaches and penalties, the team, opponents and the ball, but also about happiness, friendship and love.
7. Bookstore in Tehran, Marjan Kamali
Roya, a teenage girl living in the midst of political turmoil in Tehran in 1953, finds peace and happiness in Mr. Fakhri's bookstore, a cozy literary oasis crammed with books, pens, and bottles of jewel-colored ink. When Mr. Fakhri meets Roya with his second favorite customer – the handsome Bahman, a passionate advocate of justice and lover of Rumi's poetry – a special relationship will develop between them.
A few months later, riots break out in the main city square as a result of a coup that will change and divide their country, but also their lives.
Six decades later, fate will bring them together again, and Roya will finally get the chance to ask the questions that have haunted her her whole life.
8. The Secret of Raspberry Jam, Karim Zaimović
9. I am Damir Uzunović
" I am ... it grows and matures together with its narrator, and from short stories from childhood, through convincing youthful episodes, it grows into a masterpiece of a mature writer, his poetics, worldview and the complete overflow of his own 'I' with the 'I' that was spoken at the end of life. I am is a dancing, magnificent and touching novel in which Uzunović literally kills the reader emotionally."
Jagna Pogačnik, Best Book
"Ordinary writers write about people and cities, and talented ones bring them to life. Or, to use that big word, they resurrect them. Excellent literature is so close to God's creation. This is, on the one hand, so personal, and on the other, such a uniquely shared story... A magnificent novel about ordinary lives."
Zoran Feric
10. Catch the rabbit, Lana Bastašić
"There are several well-known sentences used to describe Lana Bastašić's debut novel Catch the Rabbit . It is a story about the friendship of two young women, it is also a story about their maturation in an extremely patriarchal and conservative society during the dark nineties, and the somewhat less dark 2000s. It is also an extremely feminist prose in which the descriptions of sex have no romance, because sexual maturation is described as it is the only way it could be in our society, which suppressed its sexual energy. And it is described as a painful process of getting to know one's body, which is not without poetic wonder. It happens in the scene when the two main characters, Sara and Lejla, go to the market to buy a rabbit after having arranged for the first time in their lives, in order to replace the bitterness of the painful experience with something childlike and beautiful.
The feminism of this book is essential in the primitive and violent society in which we live. The atmosphere of the disintegration of a society and the anguish of war are brilliantly portrayed.
Catch the Rabbit is about all of the above, but it is primarily a novel of search realized in the form of a road novel in which the main driving force of the plot is a person who is not there. It is a story about the disappearance of people with the wrong first and last names in Banja Luka during the war of 1992–1995. It is told mercilessly and uncompromisingly, through two narrative streams, precisely and clearly. It is a poignant novel in which Lana Bastašić masters the form she has imposed on herself. Catch the Rabbit is strong evidence that the female writing boom in Bosnia and Herzegovina continues to the delight of all of us readers of first-class literature.
Faruk Sehic