The Cellist of Sarajevo

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