"Intelligent, honest, and full of heart," My Heart is an intimate work of autobiographical fiction by one of ex-Yugoslavia's greatest writers about his family's experience as refugees from the Bosnian war--a timeless story of love, memory, and the resilience of the human spirit that "has all the qualities one might seek in a friend" (Etgar Keret, author of The Seven Goods Years).
"Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die." When a writer suffers a heart attack at the age of fifty, he must confront his mortality in a country that is not his native home. Confined to a hospital bed and overcome by a sense of powerlessness, he reflects on the fragility of life and finds extraordinary meaning in the quotidian. In this affecting autobiographical novel, Semezdin Mehmedinovic explores the love he and his family have for one another, strengthened by trauma; their harrowing experience of the Bosnian war, which led them to flee for the United States as refugees; eerie premonitions of Donald Trump's presidency; the life and work of a writer; and the nature of memory and grief.
Poetically explosive and pure to the core, My Heart serves as a kind of mirror, reflecting our human strengths and weaknesses along with the most important issues on our minds--love and death, the present and the past, sickness and health, leaving and staying.
Genre: Literary Fiction
"Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die." When a writer suffers a heart attack at the age of fifty, he must confront his mortality in a country that is not his native home. Confined to a hospital bed and overcome by a sense of powerlessness, he reflects on the fragility of life and finds extraordinary meaning in the quotidian. In this affecting autobiographical novel, Semezdin Mehmedinovic explores the love he and his family have for one another, strengthened by trauma; their harrowing experience of the Bosnian war, which led them to flee for the United States as refugees; eerie premonitions of Donald Trump's presidency; the life and work of a writer; and the nature of memory and grief.
Poetically explosive and pure to the core, My Heart serves as a kind of mirror, reflecting our human strengths and weaknesses along with the most important issues on our minds--love and death, the present and the past, sickness and health, leaving and staying.
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"My Heart is a family memoir, a personal account, a travelogue, a history, an immigrant story, and more, much more. A brilliant, unforgettable book, concise yet expansive, both microscopic and universal in its scope. It's a record of the everyday, of the quotidian as informed by our PTSD. An astonishing achievement." - Rabih Alameddine
"Semezdin Memedinovic charts the collapse of a world with heartbreaking clarity and precision . . . conveys the same clear-eyed passion for the truth that one finds in the young Hemingway, the Hemingway of our time." - Paul Auster
"Readers will discover that Mehmedinovoic's powerfully affecting and honest tale of the dizzy perimeter of mortality is also the oldest and best kind of story: one of love." - Rivka Galchen
"A marvel of thoughtfulness and love." - Aleksandar Hemon
"Intelligent, honest, and full of heart, Mehmedinovic's novel has all the qualities one might seek in a friend. Like a friend, it is honest enough to tell you even the harshest of truths, and, like a true friend, it ensures that you will never feel alone while you read it, even in its most heartbreaking moments." - Etgar Keret
"One of the most endearingly ruminative, sweetly sorrowful short novels I have ever encountered. A quietly devastating portrait of grief and loss, the soul-ache of exile, and the sustaining power of familial love, My Heart broke mine." - Dan Sheehan
"Semezdin Memedinovic charts the collapse of a world with heartbreaking clarity and precision . . . conveys the same clear-eyed passion for the truth that one finds in the young Hemingway, the Hemingway of our time." - Paul Auster
"Readers will discover that Mehmedinovoic's powerfully affecting and honest tale of the dizzy perimeter of mortality is also the oldest and best kind of story: one of love." - Rivka Galchen
"A marvel of thoughtfulness and love." - Aleksandar Hemon
"Intelligent, honest, and full of heart, Mehmedinovic's novel has all the qualities one might seek in a friend. Like a friend, it is honest enough to tell you even the harshest of truths, and, like a true friend, it ensures that you will never feel alone while you read it, even in its most heartbreaking moments." - Etgar Keret
"One of the most endearingly ruminative, sweetly sorrowful short novels I have ever encountered. A quietly devastating portrait of grief and loss, the soul-ache of exile, and the sustaining power of familial love, My Heart broke mine." - Dan Sheehan
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