How the soldier repairs the gramophone

Wars can destroy everything except imagination.

Bosnian Saša Stanišić fled the war as a child. Over the years, in the new life he built in Germany, he erased his childhood memories. To recapture that time, a past of war, abandonment, and destruction, he creates Aleksandar, the narrator of his debut novel , How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone .

This autobiographical fiction proves that war can destroy everything except the imagination. A resounding critical success, the book was among the six finalists for the 2006 German Book of the Year Award (Deutscher Buchpreis)—Germany's most prestigious—and won numerous awards, including the Audience Award at the Ingeborg Bachmann Competition and, in 2008, the Adelbert Van Chamisso and Heimito-von-Doderer Awards. It is a testament to the quality of contemporary Eastern European literature.

In the novel, Aleksandar lives in a small town in Bosnia. His favorite pastime—and greatest talent—is storytelling. A skill he inherited from his grandfather doesn't always mesh with the tedious school routine. However, when war destroys his world, and Aleksandar takes refuge with his parents in southern Germany, his imagination takes on a fundamental role. Through fantastical and fanciful narratives, he will preserve a memory while transforming his lost homeland into a fictional territory.

A novel of exceptional exuberance—poetic, tragic, and comic— How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone tells of an exceptional childhood lived under extraordinary circumstances, about the brutal loss of what we trust most, and about the indestructible faith in storytelling. Because not all pasts are smooth sailing, but even so, it doesn't make sense to let them be forgotten.