Sarajevo is under siege.

As mortars fall and snipers stalk the city’s abandoned buildings, a cellist sits at his window playing Albinoni’s Adagio. Then a bomb kills twenty-two people in the street below.

For the next twenty-two days he will carry his cello into the cratered street below and play the Adagio in memory of the dead. Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo imagines these twenty-two days through the eyes of three inhabitants of the city as they struggle with the physical and emotional brutality of war.

A snapshot of survival in a time of fear and suffering, The Cellist of Sarajevo provides a glimpse of the human spirit that even war cannot extinguish.

Praise for The Cellist of Sarajevo:

'A gripping story of Sarajevo under siege.'

— J. M. Coetzee

‘Though the setting is the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, this gripping novel transcends time and place. It is a universal story, and a testimony to the struggle to find meaning, grace, and humanity, even amid the most unimaginable horrors.’

— Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

'Galloway's novel does the work of a good fiction: it transports you to a situation that might be alien to you, makes it familiar, and so brings understanding…Your mind's eye sees, your moral sense is outraged: your full humanity is being exercised…A grand and powerful novel about how people retain or reclaim their humanity when they are under extreme duress.'

— Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi

‘Unforgettable imagery and heartbreaking simplicity.’

— Washington Post

'Steven Galloway is a precocious writer of astonishing talent and creative imagination.'

— Quill & Quire