Songs From This and That Country

Songs From This and That Country Book Signing
Owl's Nest Books
November 2 | 1 - 3 PM

“A visceral depiction of the inhumanity of oppression, Songs from This and That Country is, at its core, an unforgettable story of the evocative resonance of one’s past.” — Don Aker, bestselling author of The First Stone

It is 1996: a mortar shell explodes, shredding nine Sarajevan citizens, while a Canadian opera singer and others huddle together in horrified solidarity; thirty years earlier: a mother gives birth to a caul baby, a strange child who seems able to will events into being; forty-five years earlier: a young man returns home from the Italian front and his hair has turned snow white; 600 years earlier: a young woman leaves her father, a despot under the Ottomans, to meet the witch Baba Roga from whom she learns that father and Turk are not so very different; and back in 1996: a young opera singer, estranged from her parents, sings about all of this and contemplates killing her father.

Songs from This and That Country is an inter-generational story that examines the reality of age-old ethnic conflicts between Serbs-Croats-Muslims, exposing these divisive and acrimonious relationships as recursive and mirrored in the lives of first- and second-generation families. As a blend of family drama, historical fact and fairy tale, Songs reflects a South Slavic immigrant experience, WWII infantry service in 1940s Italy, the Bosnian conflicts in the 1990s, and the rise of a second generation Serb-Canadian opera singer–all set in relief to a Slavic fairy tale in the time of the Ottoman Empire.