My Heart

Author(s): Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Celia Hawkesworth (translator)

Location(s): United States (USA), Balkans

Genre(s): Autobiography/Memoirs, Fiction, In Translation

Era(s): Late 20th century, early 21st century

TRANSLATED BY CELIA HAWKESWORTH

An intimate work of autobiographical fiction by one of ex-Yugoslavia’s greatest writers about his family’s experience as refugees from the Bosnian war – a timeless story of love, memory, and the resilience of the human spirit.

‘Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die.’

When a writer suffers a heart attack at the age of fifty, he must confront his mortality in a country that is not his native home. Confined to a hospital bed and overcome by a sense of powerlessness, he reflects on the fragility of life and finds extraordinary meaning in the quotidian.

In this affecting autobiographical novel, Semezdin Mehmedinovic explores the love he and his family have for one another, strengthened by trauma; their harrowing experience of the Bosnian war, which led them to flee for the United States as refugees; eerie premonitions of Donald Trump’s presidency; the life and work of a writer; and the nature of memory and grief.

Poetically explosive and pure to the core, My Heart serves as a kind of mirror, reflecting our human strengths and weaknesses along with the most important issues on our mindslove and death, the present and the past, sickness and health, leaving and staying.

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