Aleksandar Hemon

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Book of My Lives, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times bestseller. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a 'Genius' grant from the MacArthur Foundation.

Aleksander joins us for his highly anticipated new novel The World and All It Holds, described by Shuggie Bain’s Douglas Stuart as “a staggering work of beauty and brutality.” This major new novel is a grand, tender and sweeping story spanning decades and continents.

As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can't put in perspective.

And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto's introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller and Pinto's protector and lover.

Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto's love for Osman that will truly survive.

Theirs is an epic story of a world in convulsion, of millions broken between war, displacement and revolution, and of bonds so strong that they stretch from Sarajevo to Shanghai without snapping, and encompass all.

“This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon's masterpiece.” - David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas