Under Pressure
(Istros Books, 2019)
Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020
It’s a long time since I’ve been as excited by such original writing. Šehić’s sentences are often delivered like bullets, often without verbs, as if the excess of war merits no adornment, and as if he feels under pressure always to be authentic and true to the experience. – Rosie Goldsmith, European Literature Network
Few writers have evoked the horrors and consequences of war like Faruk Šehić, meaning that underlying lessons contained in this unforgettable book deserve wide dissemination. It burns with pain like the pages from a million books drifting across a city under the siege. – Charlie Connelly, New European
Šehić’s fine eye for detail serves to aestheticize atrocity without ever fetishizing it.. . Brilliant, insightful, poetic, and breathtaking. – Michael Tate, Los Angeles Review of Books
It’s a bold work that never lets up and, like war, it’s gruelling, ragged and unbearably sad. – Lucy Popescu, New Humanist
(. .) a book of powerful semi- autobiographical vignettes, mostly (but not only) from the conict. The narrator and his comrades drink copiously, take drugs, have sex and loot if the opportunity arises. . . . As the narrator pops pills, throws punches and succumbs to post-traumatic stress, his heart skips “like a series of short bursts of machine gunnery”— as does Mr Sehic’s writing. – Tim Judah, The Economist
Quiet Flows the Una
(Istros Books, 2016)
But the Una of the mind flows on with its submerged treasures, shining in the darkness from which its author has salvaged it. Through his exploration of war and peace, innocence and grief, Šehić has composed a humbling meditation on an existential conundrum that is central to collective and private trauma, but also to more ordinary human experience: how to keep the inner self whole in a world that will assault it in unimaginable ways. – Kapka Kassabova, The Guardian
It’s hard to catalog the many ways this work satisfies. There is its intellectual rigor—with generous reference points in modern and contemporary film, literature, music, and philosophy, placing events insistently within our larger, shared culture—as well as the prose’s generally uncompromising tenor itself. There is its psychological rigor, restraining any impulse to moral superiority. There is the sheer compression and innovation, pushing this narrative into folds of continually greater nuance and delight—and make no mistake, this is a work flooded with delight… – Andrew Singer World Literature Today
The majestic Una river becomes a metaphor for life – and death – in this delicate, haunting novel by a veteran of the Bosnian war… vivid, recurring and at times fantastical. – Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
(…) as elegant and elusive as the text of Quiet Flows the Una, which itself resists easy characterisation and forever darts out of expectation’s grasp. The result is an eco-poetical vision of remarkable richness and grandeur, where the spectacle of death is always outmatched by that of growth. – Vladimir Zorić, Review 31
faruk šehić 