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Winner of the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature, Lana Bastašić's powerful debut novel Catch the Rabbit is an emotionally rich excavation of the complicated friendship between two women in a fractured, post-war Bosnia as they venture into the treacherous terrain of the Balkan wonderlands and their own history.
It's been twelve years since inseparable childhood friends Lejla and Sara have spoken, but an unexpected phone call thrusts Sara back into a world she left behind, a language she's buried, and painful memories that rise unbidden to the surface. Lejla's magnetic pull hasn't lessened despite the distance between Dublin and Bosnia or the years of silence imposed by a youthful misunderstanding, and Sara finds herself returning home, driven by curiosity and guilt. Embarking on a road trip from Bosnia to Vienna in search of Lejla's exiled brother Armin, the two travel down the rabbit hole of their shared past and question how they've arrived at their present, disparate realities.
As their journey takes them further from their homeland, Sara realizes that she can never truly escape her past or Lejla―the two are intrinsically linked, but perpetually on opposite sides of the looking glass. As they approach their final destination, Sara contends with the chaos of their relationship. Lejla's conflicting memories of their past, further complicated by the divisions brought on by the dissolution of Yugoslavia during their childhoods, forces Sara to reckon with her own perceived reality. Like Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, Catch the Rabbit lays bare the intricacies of female friendship and all the ways in which two people can hurt, love, disappoint, and misunderstand one another.
"[A] winning debut...The narrative reaches a greatly satisfying climax, built on themes of rediscovering the past, memories, women's friendships, language, and identity. This unforgettable tour de force surprises at every turn." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A moving exploration of how perspective characterizes friendship, sometimes to a fault." - Kirkus Reviews
"Set against the striking backdrop of post-war Bosnia, Catch the Rabbit is a poignant, wrenching novel about the power of memory and the challenges of knowing another person." - Foreword Reviews
"Lana Bastašić's novel of two young women plunging into post-war Bosnia like two Alices into Wonderland is smart, energetic, passionate, announcing a major talent." - Aleksandar Hemon
"Lana Bastašić's novel Catch the Rabbit is perhaps the first major book to express some important truths about post-war Bosnia. This on-the-road story about two friends who set out in search of answers to the most important questions from their past will be a classic." - Semezdin Mehmedinović, author of My Heart
This information about Catch the Rabbit was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lana Bastašić is a Yugoslav-born writer. She majored in English and holds a master's degree in cultural studies. She has published three collections of short stories, one book of children's stories, and one of poetry. Her debut novel Catch the Rabbit was shortlisted for the 2019 NIN Award and was awarded the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature. She lives in Belgrade.
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