The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

From Sarajevo to Shanghai, every sentence, every paragraph is a sensuous and often hilarious delight.

In short, a masterpiece.' -RABIH ALAMEDDINE, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope 'Hemonites rejoice! The master is back and he has forged a remarkable tale of love and war alongside his own 20th Century Silk Road. It's a road novel, an immigrant tale, a ghost story, a family portrait, a mystery, a historical epic, a war novel, and yes, a love story-it is all that and more, a feat of unfettered literary bravura. 'Aleksandar Hemon's The World and All That It Holds is one of the finest novels I've ever read, and like all great stories, it refuses to be pigeonholed. Over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto's love for Osman-with the occasional opiatic interlude-that keeps him going. Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, tangle with spies and Bolsheviks. 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 Pinto's protector and lover. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. 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 from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can't put in perspective. 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 estimable father. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents. The World and All That It Holds -in all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical glory-showcases Aleksandar Hemon's celebrated talent at its pinnacle.

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon