Premeditated Murder by Slobodan Selenic

Premeditated Murder

Slobodan Selenic

Grandmother Jelena loved and killed, perhaps, in wartime Serbia. Granddaughter Jelena sifts through fragments of papers and an old man's memories as the resurgent Serbs fight Croatian nationalists and she risks losing her lover and, maybe, her country. The constant shifts in the storyline are often difficult to follow, but I found it impossible not to be moved by the difficult choices facing the two women. I liked the younger Jelena very much more than her privileged ancestor - but then the older Jelena would have expected me to!

Extract
Hitler was not the one defeated in this war, Jovan. We were. You and me. We were the biggest losers of this war. Not because they confiscated Stavra's houses and factories but because they confiscated our world, a world in which it was possible to live as we pleased and differently than prescribed by the crowds intoxicated by their new rights in the new state of equality for everybody and everything.
Parallels
  • Embers by Sandor Marai
  • Homestead by Rosina Lippi
  • Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Borrow this book
Violence
Explicit sexual Content