Aleksandar Hemon

Set to be a literary highlight of 2023, Bosnian-American Aleksandar Hemon's The World and All That It Holds is a grand, tender and sweeping story spanning decades and continents. Heartbreaking, philosophical, blackly funny in places, sensuous in others, it is deeply immersive, gripping and moving.

But don't take our word for it, take the opinion of some the world's most acclaimed literary talents:

‘The World And All That It Holds is a masterwork of the epic and the intimate. I lost myself to this tale of Sarajevans drawn into the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and their fight to survive in the war that followed. It is a staggering work of beauty and brutality, a testament to love, family, and the ties that call us home.’ DOUGLAS STUART

‘The World and All That It Holds is a twisting, turning epic rooted in love in all its forms; an odyssey of statelessness; a haunted museum of history ranging from Sarajevo to Shanghai and Jerusalem; and an apothecary of wit, folklore and unexpectable sentences. This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon’s masterpiece.’ DAVID MITCHELL

The World and All It Holds 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.

Hemon, a poet of the displaced, has said of this novel: 'My people move through space, across borders. That’s part of my experience of who I am, of who everyone I know really is. We are migratory' - and this is just one of the deeply resonant themes of this novel and of Hemon's work as a whole.

Aleksandar will only be doing a handful of events on a whistle-stop tour of the UK before heading back to the States. So don't miss your chance to hear from him.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of several works of fiction, including The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man and The Lazarus Project, and of non-fiction works The Book of My Lives (which includes the devastating essay ‘The Aquarium’, extracted in The New Yorker) and My Parents: An Introduction and This Does Not Belong to You. His work as a screenplay writer includes most recently The Matrix Resurrections (co-written with David Mitchell). He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a ‘Genius’ grant from the MacArthur Foundation. Aleksandar Hemon also writes and records music (EDM) under the name Cielo Hemon. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.