The universally respected NPR journalist and bestselling memoirist
Scott Simon makes a dazzling fiction debut. In Pretty Birds, Simon
creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of a classic
character-a young woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the
early 1990s.
In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high
school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her
parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hitting a
hoop. Irena wears her hair short like k. d. lang's, and she loves
Madonna, Michael Jordan, and Johnny Depp. But while Irena rocks out
and shoots baskets with her friends, her beloved city has become a
battleground. When the violence and terror of "ethnic cleansing"
against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb
soldiers, flee for safety across the river that divides the city.
If once Irena knew of war only from movies and history books, now
she knows its reality. She steals from the dead to buy food. She
scuttles under windows in her own home to dodge bullets. She risks
her life to communicate with an old Serb school friend and
teammate. Even Pretty Bird has started to mimic the sizzle of
mortar fire.
In a city starved for work, a former assistant principal offers
Irena a vague job, "duties as assigned," which she accepts. She
begins by sweeping floors, but soon, under the tutelage of a cast
of rogues and heroes, she learns to be a sniper, biding her time,
never returning to the same perch, and searching her targets for
the "mist" that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena's new
vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for
herself and those she loves.
As a journalist, Scott Simon covered the siege of Sarajevo. Here,
in a novel as suspenseful as a John le Carre thriller, he
re-creates the atmosphere of that place and time and the pain and
dark humor of its people. Pretty Birds is a bold departure, and the
auspicious beginning of yet another brilliant career for its
author.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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