Garden, Ashes

The celebrated Serbian writer Danilo Kis has blended bits of realism, snatches of dreams, and echoes of his own consciousness as a child to shape this magical and memorable novel.

In Yugoslavia during the Second World War, young Andi Scham and his beleaguered family are constantly moving and searching for refuge. Yet the physical hardships of the world do not intrude on Andi’s adolescent world of vivid observation and imaginative withdrawals. From his memories emerges the wondrous story of his father, Eduard Scham-the Wandering Jew, Don Quixote, red-eyed, crazed, drunk, bellicose, a man who recedes from life and then disappears in the Holocaust.

Andi’s search for his father is a poetic, lyrical remembrance of things past.

Danilo Kis (1935-1989) was a Yugoslavian author and translator born in what is now Serbia to a Jewish father murdered at Auschwitz and an Eastern Orthodox mother. After his book A Tomb for Boris Davidovich was accused of anti-nationalism he went into self-imposed exile in France. He was awarded the Golden Eagle of the City of Nice and, just before his death in Paris in 1989, American PEN’s Bruno Schulz Prize.

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation genius grant.