BOLLA - A NOVEL

B>From the author of National Book Award finalist Crossing comes an unlikely love story in Kosovo with unpredictable consequences that reverberates throughout a young man''s life--a dazzling tale full of fury, tenderness, longing, and lust./b>br> br> April 1995. Arsim is a twenty-four-year-old, recently married student at the University of Pristina, in Kosovo, 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 Milo¨, a Serb. Before the day is out, everything has changed for both of them, and within a week two milestones erupt in Arsims married life: his wife announces her first pregnancy and he begins a life in secret. br> br> After these fevered beginnings, Arsim and Milo¨s unlikely affair is derailed by the outbreak of war, which sends Arsims fledgling family abroad and timid Milo¨ spiraling down a dark path, as depicted through chaotic journal entries. Years later, deported back to Pristina after a spell in prison and now alone and hopeless, Arsim finds himself in a broken reality that makes him completely question his past. What happened to him, to them, exactly? How much can you endure, and forgive? br> br> Entwined with their story is a re-created legend of a demonic serpent, Bolla; its an unearthly tale that gives Arsim and Milo¨ a language through which to reflect on what they once had. With luminous prose and a delicate eye, Pajtim Statovci delivers a relentless novel of desire, destruction, intimacy, and the different fronts of war.