NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKPAGE, BOOKLIST,
AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE • ALEX AWARD WINNER • LOS ANGELES TIMES
BOOK PRIZE FINALIST • LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE
FOR FICTION
For readers of The Tiger’s Wife and All the Light We Cannot See
comes a powerful debut novel about a girl’s coming of age—and how
her sense of family, friendship, love, and belonging is
profoundly shaped by war.
Zagreb, 1991. Ana Jurić is a carefree ten-year-old, living with
her family in a small apartment in Croatia’s capital. But that
year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana’s
idyllic childhood. Daily life is altered by food rations and air
raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire.
Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana’s sense of
safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana
must find her way in a dangerous world.
New York, 2001. Ana is now a college student in Manhattan.
Though she’s tried to move on from her past, she can’t escape her
memories of war—secrets she keeps even from those closest to her.
Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, Ana
returns to Croatia after a decade away, hoping to make peace with
the place she once called home. As she faces her ghosts, she must
come to terms with her country’s difficult history and the events
that interrupted her childhood years before.
Moving back and forth through time, Girl at War is an honest,
generous, brilliantly written novel that illuminates how history
shapes the individual. Sara Nović fearlessly shows the impact of
war on one young girl—and its legacy on all of us. It’s a debut
by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a story
that continues to resonate today.
Praise for Girl at War
“Outstanding . . . Girl at War performs the miracle of making the
stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and
universal as myth.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s
Choice)
“[An] old-fashioned page-turner that will demand all of the
reader’s attention, happily given. A debut novel that
astonishes.”—Vanity Fair
“Shattering . . . The book begins with what deserves to become
one of contemporary literature’s more memorable opening lines.
The sentences that follow are equally as lyrical as a folk lament
and as taut as metal wire wrapped through an electrified
fence.”—USA Today
“Gripping . . . Nović, in tender and eloquent prose, explores the
challenge of how to live even after one has survived.”—O: The
Oprah Magazine
“Powerful and vividly wrought . . . Nović writes about horrors
with an elegant understatement. In cool, accomplished sentences,
we are met with the gravity, brutality and even the mundaneness
of war and loss as well as the enduring capacity to live.”—San
Francisco Chronicle
“ and immense . . . a writer whose own gravity and talent
anchor this novel.”—The New York Times
“An important and profoundly moving reading experience.”—The
National
“Remarkable.”—Julia Glass, The Boston Globe
“[A] powerful, gorgeous debut novel.”—Adam Johnson, The Week
“An unforgettable portrait of how war forever changes the life of
the individual . . . a writer working with deep reserves of
talent, heart, and mind.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad
True Love Story