THE BOSNIA LIST by Kenan Trebincevic and Susan Shapiro. It chronicles an incredible journey and testifies to a piece of history that happened so close but most of us are ignorant about.

It’s both a story of the betrayals of war and a narrative about finding your own way in a ‘foreign’ world. There aren’t many books out there on the conflict – surprisingly – and they’re usually written by outsiders. Journalists or aid workers. Penguin US is aiming for a pub date in late 2013 when the UN tribunal has indicated they’re aiming to close all the Balkan War Crimes trials.

Kenan was also interviewed for the BBC. Click here for full interview.

THE BOSNIA LIST has been included in Library Journal’s ‘12 Spring Books You Shouldn’t Miss’. Please click here for the full article.

“When I told my work buddies I’d be visiting Bosnia, they thought it sounded like a cool trip, as if I was going sightseeing in Paris or Barcelona. They had no idea of the complex history of Yugoslavia, a land still divided by cultural hatreds that began in medieval days.“

In 1992 Slobodan Milosevic had risen to power in Yugoslavia on a platform of Serbian nationalism effectively turning Bosnia into a war zone. Kenan, his family and their fellow Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) were targeted in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing. Spending a terrifying year trying to escape, hiding and surviving from Serbian military, they were subjected daily to intimate betrayals from friends and neighbors who overnight had become enemies.

After twenty years of ‘exile’ in Queens (NY) Kenan, his father, and brother, finally return to their hometown of Brcko. While his father and brother visit old friends, Kenan has a different agenda, bucket list of his own, that becomes his obsession. He calls it THE BOSNIA LIST. A catalogue of 12 neighbors, classmates, and war criminals he plans to confront in order to make sense of and move past his experiences from the war. But as he ticks off items on the list a new one starts taking shape.
THE BOSNIA LIST is a moving and poignant testimony to a piece of global history most of us are ignorant of. Accompanying Kenan and his family on their journey back to their homeland, one experiences first-hand the whirlwind of emotion that these men overcomes seeing their former family home after 20 years of exile. Present day and the memories of 1991/1992 interspersed one can only wonder if the human condition is an opportunistic one.

Kenan Trebincevic came to the United States in 1993, went to college in Connecticut and became an American citizen in 2001. He works as a physical therapist in Greenwich Village and lives in Astoria Queens, amid 10,000 other former Yugoslavians. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Times Op-Ed page, The International Herald Tribune, and Salon.com. Please see his website for more information: http://www.kenantrebincevic.com/

Susan Shapiro, a Manhattan journalism professor, is the author of 8 books. She freelances for The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Newsweek, Salon, Psychology Today & Marie Claire.

Articles about Kenan and his family have been previously published in NY Times:

MARSHAL TITO IN QUEENS

LIVES THE RECKONING 

Praise for THE BOSNIA LIST:

“Kenan searches to confront old enemies, but what he finds instead […] That the most significant parts of his life in Bosnia […] were not filled with hate, but rather filled with "exactly enough" love—the people that helped him and his family survive. A poignant, powerful look at forgiveness.” – Oprah.com

“A mesmerizing story of survival and healing” —Booklist

“In this astute account, co-authored with Shapiro (Five Men Who Broke My Heart), is readably organized and evenhanded. The great instruction of this important work is the author’s moral transformation that helped him replace hate with grace, if not forgiveness.” —Publisher’s Weekly.

“A young New Yorker haunted by searing memories goes on a most unusual overseas vacation – not to sightsee or party but to confront the ordinary men and women who tore his family’s lives apart. His journey takes us into a time of mesmerizing violence and betrayal when neighbors set upon each other as though it were the 1940s all over again – a world of twisted emotions and baffling brutality lying just below the surface of his contemporary Europe. The Bosnia List is powerful, the flashbacks riveting.” —Tom Reiss, bestselling author of The Black Count and The Orientalist

“With understated elegance and in highly personal pointillist dots, Kenan Trebincevic illuminates how the Bosnian tragedy blighted, and continues to blight, the lives of countless people both in his homeland and in its far-flung diaspora. This important and original work reminds us, in ways large and small, of the long half-life of an atrocity.” —David Margolick, bestselling author of Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock and Strange Fruit

“The Bosnia List tells a fascinating story of a harrowing and heart-rending journey. It’s a graceful, taut memoir of family, friends and faith: a moving recollection of souls being torn asunder and slowly beginning to heal” —Laurence Bergreen, bestselling author of Columbus: The Four Journeys and Marco Polo: From Venice to Zanadu

“The Bosnia List was difficult to finish because it touched me so deeply. I’ve wondered how another Bosniak could describe their tragedy and traumas, watching the transformation of former friends and neighbors becoming animals. Most powerful was how Kenan’s mother’s voice echoed in his head and became his morality, preventing him from getting revenge. She’s one of the strongest, best described female characters in Bosnian literature... And I was rooting for Kenan’s father not to succumb to evil and stay a good man. That might be why his family survived. That shows us all: if we stay good, we have a chance.” —Dr. Esad Boskailo, Psychiatrist, Bosnian war survivor, and co-author of Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror

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Osoby zainteresowane tytułem proszone są o kontakt z Renatą Paczewską pod adresem renata@literatura.com.pl 

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