That rending conflict wired his debut – How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone – with a crackling tragi-comic current of rage and sorrow, nostalgia and grief. This is the second novel by Saša Stanišić, born in Bosnia in 1978 and a teenage refugee from the civil war in former Yugoslavia. And so the little backwater of Fürstenfelde banks another tale in the treasury of stories that braid its people together. Fantasy, folklore, or history: who gets to decide? Back in the present, another young Anna manages to disarm a depressed retired soldier who harbours suicidal, or maybe murderous, thoughts. "Who writes the old stories? Who takes that job on?" In one of the swift dives into the past that punctuate this fictional portrait of a small town in eastern Germany, a girl named Anna stands on the walls with a crossbow to defend her home against the "marauding Soldiery" of the Thirty Years War.
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