Where You Come from - Paperback

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by Sasa Stanisic (Author), Damion Searls (Translator)

Longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award

A Washington Post, Chicago Review of Books, Kirkus, and Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Month

"Inventive, funny and moving." ―The New York Times Book Review

Translated from the German by Damion Searls

Winner of the German Book Prize, Sasa Stanisic's inventive and surprising novel asks: What makes us who we are?

In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia and arrive in Germany. Six months later, the boy's father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Sasa Stanisic's Where You Come From is a novel about this family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, and the years that followed their escape as they created a new life in a new country.

Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Where You Come From is set in a village where only thirteen people remain, in lost and made-up memories, in coincidences, in choices, and in a dragons' den. Translated by Damion Searls, it's a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that playfully twists form and genre with wit and heart to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.

Author Biography

Sasa Stanisic was born in Visegrad (Yugoslavia) in 1978 and has lived in Germany since 1992. His debut novel, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, was translated into thirty-one languages; Before the Feast was a bestseller and won the renowned Leipzig Book Fair Prize.

Damion Searls is an award-winning translator from German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch, and the author of The Inkblots, a history of the Rorschach test and biography of its creator.

Number of Pages: 364

Dimensions: 1.2 x 8.5 x 5.5 IN

Publication Date: December 07, 2021

Award: National Book Awards (2022)