Bolla

From the author of Crossing--a National Book Award finalist--comes a dazzling tale full of fury, tenderness, longing, and lust.
April 1995. Arsim is a twenty-two-year-old, recently-married student at the University of Pristina, keeping his head down to gain a university degree in a time and place deeply hostile to Albanians. In a café he meets a young man named Milos, a Serb. Before the day is out, everything has changed for both of them, and within a week two milestones erupt in Arsim's married life: his wife announces her first pregnancy, and he begins a life in secret.
After these febrile beginnings, Arsim and Milos's unlikely affair is derailed by the outbreak of war, which sends Arsim's fledgling family abroad and the timid Milos spiraling down a dark path. Years later, deported back to Pristina after a spell in prison, Arsim, alone and hopeless, finds himself in a broken reality that completely questions his past.
Entwined with their story is a recreated legend of a demonic serpent, Bolla: an unearthly tale that gives Arsim and Milos a language through which to reflect what they once had. With luminous prose and a delicate eye, Statovci delivers a relentless novel of desire, destruction, intimacy, and the different fronts of war.

PAJTIM STATOVCI was born in Kosovo to Albanian parents in 1990. His family fled the Yugoslav wars and moved to Finland when he was two years old. He holds an MA in comparative literature and is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki. His first book, My Cat Yugoslavia, won the Helsingin Sanomat Literature Prize for best debut novel; his second novel, Crossing, was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Bolla was awarded Finland's highest literary honor, the Finlandia Prize. In 2018, he received the Helsinki Writer of the Year Award.