Author(s): Faruk Sehic; Mirza Puric (Translator)

Fiction

UNDER PRESSURE is a fragmentary book that brings together brutal and heart-wrenching stories from the frontline of the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s. It was this book that secured Faruk Šehić's reputation as one of the greatest writers to emerge from the region in recent years. A war veteran and a poet, Šehić combines beauty and horror to seduce and surprise the reader: never maudlin or sensationalist, his writing exposes the ugly heart of man's inhumanity and the dreadful cost borne by those who find them- selves caught up in conflict.

WINNER OF THE EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

"Šehić literally describes the war through the gun sight of an AK-47. His book is brutal, naturalistic, honest and uncompromising; his characters kill and get killed, they rob corpses and homes, they get drunk and get into fights, they parade in front of a mirror wearing a uniform ripped off a dead soldier... There's drugs and alcohol in abundance, and they are - paradoxically - reason's last line of defence. But more importantly, Šehić does not use that paradox to describe his characters, but rather the times they live in. Alcohol and drugs are the means of escape into a better, parallel reality, to escape into an illusion of life." JOSIP MLAKIĆ