Aleksandar Hemon Books in Order

These linked stories explore family history, war and displacement between Bosnia and Chicago. Children, exiles and survivors struggle to understand the past, while personal memories collide with the upheavals that shattered Yugoslavia and carried its people abroad.

Jozef Pronek leaves Sarajevo for Chicago in 1992 and finds himself unable to return as war breaks out. Shifting perspectives follow his childhood and immigrant life, tracing the uncertainty of identity, belonging and survival between two worlds.

A young narrator grows up in cosmopolitan Sarajevo before leaving for the United States as war tears his city apart. Connected stories turn ordinary experiences into encounters with desire, displacement and the difficulty of making sense of a changing world.

In 1908, police kill Jewish immigrant Lazarus Averbuch in Chicago and brand him an anarchist assassin. A century later, two friends journey toward his birthplace, investigating the death while confronting their own experiences of exile and belonging.

Aleksandar Hemon recalls growing up in Sarajevo and arriving in Chicago for a short visit that became exile when war broke out. These essays examine memory, family and the effort to build a life after losing a familiar world.

Aleksandar Hemon traces his devotion to football from childhood games in Sarajevo to life in Chicago and decades of World Cups. Personal memories reveal how sport connects exile, national identity, family and the passing stages of a life.

Chicago ESL teacher Josh Levin dreams of writing a successful zombie screenplay. After trouble with his landlord pushes him into his girlfriend’s apartment, an affair with a student and her violent husband send his ordinary life spinning into chaos.

Two companion memoirs explore Aleksandar Hemon’s family history, his parents’ displacement from Bosnia to Canada and his childhood in Sarajevo. Intimate recollections connect domestic habits and family relationships with the political upheavals that transformed their lives.

Bosnian pharmacist Rafael Pinto goes to war in 1914 and finds love with fellow soldier Osman. Their bond carries them through trenches, revolution and displacement on a journey across continents, as violence threatens the life they hope to share.

Invited inside the United Nations as its first writer in residence, Aleksandar Hemon examines the institution's ambitions, contradictions, and daily workings. His reflections connect its international ideals with the imperfect people trying to uphold them and his own Bosnian experience.