World and All That It Holds

‘Only the past matters, because it is the only thing that outlives everything and everyone.’ This is a story of broken bones and poetic souls, and of a love so strong it defeats many wars, two revolutions, two separations and two deaths. Osman, a Muslim, and Pinto, a Jew, grow up in multilingual Sarajevo at the beginning of the twentieth century, coming of age as young men just in time to find themselves drafted into their Austro-Hungarian imperial overlords’ army, and floating to war on a tide of mud, fear, violence and horror that will carry them as POWs deep into the central Asian steppe, where the waves of the Russian Revolution break over them. A baby daughter arrives, as does a ghost, and this caravan of three endure evacuations, migrations and frostbite, crossing deserts, passes, trenches, before reaching the haze of Shanghai, and another world war, and another revolution. And all the while they are accompanied by a noisily, wantonly absent God. Theirs is an epic story of a world in convulsion, of millions broken between war, displacement and revolution, and also of individual bonds so strong, of love so absolute, that they stretch from Sarajevo to Shanghai without snapping, and conquer all. ‘Weep for the soul that cannot go home and not for the mourners hiding in a wall.’