Set in Sarajeyo, Yugoslavia, in the spring of 1992, this book tells the story of one woman's experience of the war-torn city after she finds herself alone.
Zora, a Serbian artist teaching students at the university, lives in a high-rise bock of flats with her husband and her younger daughter. Her elder daughter is married to an Englishman and has gone away to live in Suffolk and when war seems inevitable the elder daughter pleads with her family to pack their bags and join her while they still can. The rest of her family make the journey but Zora decides she will be safe enough, and feels she needs to keep working and can't just abandon her students.
Once the others have gone, the war quickly escalates and it isn't long before the shelling begins and all electrical power is lost. Zora has to rely on food parcels to get anything to eat and has no way of contacting her family in England to let them know she is still alive. At first she is coping but the harsh winter approaches and food gets scarcer and scarcer.
The events in this book took place in a European country only thirty years ago, but it is worth reading the book to learn about what it was like for people as different ethnic groups within the country fought one another after years of living side by side.
The book is not whipped up to be an artificial thriller, but it is historically accurate and everything that happened to Zora was experienced by members of the population as the war progressed. The characters feel real and it could so easily be an account of an actual family suddenly caught up in a conflict that made so many citizens prisoners in their own homes. It's frightening how quickly life can change and everything reduced to rubble, starvation and death.
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