Where You Come From
ABOUT
THE BOOK
Saša Stanišić’s Where You Come From is a novel about a village where only thirteen people remain, a country that no longer exists, a shattered family that is his own. Blending auto fiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Stanišić traces a family’s escape during the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the years that followed as they built a life in Germany. As he explores what it means to be European today, he examines how it feels to learn a new language, to find new friends and new jobs, and to build an identity between countries and cultures. Translated by Damion Searls, Where You Come From is about homelands, both remembered and imagined. A book that bends form and genre with wit, heart, and exceptional craftsmanship 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.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Damion
Searls
Damion Searls has translated more than fifty books of classic modern literature, most recently Thomas Mann’s New Selected Stories, Jon Fosse’s Septology, and Bambi. His own writing includes fiction, poetry, criticism, The Inkblots—a history of the Rorschach Test and biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach—and The Philosophy of Translation, forthcoming.
Damion Searls has translated more than fifty books of classic modern literature, most recently Thomas Mann’s New Selected Stories, Jon Fosse’s Septology, and Bambi. His own writing includes fiction, poetry, criticism, The Inkblots—a history of the Rorschach Test and biography of its creator, Hermann Rorschach—and The Philosophy of Translation, forthcoming.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
Saša Stanišić and his mixed family (Serbian and Bosnian) flee from Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and end up in Heidelberg, Germany, where they struggle to integrate, to a large extent because of the low paying jobs available to immigrants. Saša Stanišić tells his personal story in a touching, exciting and stylistic outstanding narrative Style. The novel was successful adapted for the Theater and won the German Book Prize in 2019.
– Stadtbücherei Heidelberg, Germany
Third novel from internationally acclaimed and bestselling Bosnian-German author Saša Stanišic. The story follows a young refugee and his family who fled to Germany from Yugoslavia in the 1990s. A heartwarming and moving reflection on the process reshaping ones identity between countries, cultures and languages.
– Stadtbibliothek Bremen