Girl at War: A Novel

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)
 
“If we looked for and celebrated a ‘book of the summer’ as we do that one song every year (what will it be this year?!), this novel would surely be this summer’s star.”—Vanity Fair
 
“A shattering debut . . . 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

“Intimate and immense . . . [Nović is] a writer whose own gravity and talent anchor this novel.”—The New York Times

“[A] gripping debut novel . . . 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

“Astonishing . . . an extraordinarily poised and potent debut novel, a story about grief and exile, memory and identity, and the redemptive power of love.”—Financial Times

“An unforgettable portrait of how war forever changes the life of the individual . . . a remarkable debut by a writer working with deep reserves of talent, heart, and mind.”—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story