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Where You Come From

About the Book

Where You Come From

written by Saša Stanišic, translated by Damion Searls

From the internationally acclaimed author of BEFORE THE FEAST and HOW THE SOLDIER REPAIRS THE GRAMOPHONE comes a prize-winning novel that 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. Saša Stanišic’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 13 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.

Where You Come From
written by Saša Stanišic, translated by Damion Searls

  • Publication Date: December 7, 2021
  • Genres: Fiction
  • Paperback: 364 pages
  • Publisher: Tin House Books
  • ISBN-10: 1951142756
  • ISBN-13: 9781951142759