Synopses & Reviews
The universally respected NPR journalist and bestselling memoirist Scott Simon makes a dazzling fiction debut. In
Pretty Birds, Simon creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of a classic character a young woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.
In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hitting a hoop. Irena wears her hair short like k. d. lang's, and she loves Madonna, Michael Jordan, and Johnny Depp. But while Irena rocks out and shoots baskets with her friends, her beloved city has become a battleground. When the violence and terror of "ethnic cleansing" against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb soldiers, flee for safety across the river that divides the city.
If once Irena knew of war only from movies and history books, now she knows its reality. She steals from the dead to buy food. She scuttles under windows in her own home to dodge bullets. She risks her life to communicate with an old Serb school friend and teammate. Even Pretty Bird has started to mimic the sizzle of mortar fire.
In a city starved for work, a former assistant principal offers Irena a vague job, "duties as assigned," which she accepts. She begins by sweeping floors, but soon, under the tutelage of a cast of rogues and heroes, she learns to be a sniper, biding her time, never returning to the same perch, and searching her targets for the "mist" that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena's new vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for herself and those she loves.
As a journalist, Scott Simon covered the siege of Sarajevo. Here, in a novel as suspenseful as a John le Carré thriller, he re-creates the atmosphere of that place and time and the pain and dark humor of its people. Pretty Birds is a bold departure, and the auspicious beginning of yet another brilliant career for its author.
Review
"[T]his extraordinary debut illuminates a time and place where civilians fought back....A magnificent tribute, not just to the Sarajevans whose siege Simon reported, but to the indestructible human spirit." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Pretty Birds...is an example of what can go right when a journalist turns novelist. Simon...loads the book with a specificity that comes from a seasoned reportorial eye....[A] riveting and heartbreaking tale." Christian Science Monitor
Review
"Simon, who has covered the siege of Sarajevo for NPR, puts the events in a war-torn land into human perspective with memorable characters struggling with issues of ethnicity, survival, friendship, and betrayal." Booklist
Review
"It is no insult to Simon's novelistic skill to say that his book's excellence rests finally on his reporter's eye and ear....Simon's novel is a fine tribute to the heroes and victims who were his friends [in Sarajevo]." The Washington Post
Review
"The author, host of NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday, has worked as a war correspondent in Sarajevo, and it shows in the authentic, gritty details....Highly recommended." Library Journal
Synopsis
Irena is a high-school basketball star with a frank sexuality and a wonderful sense of the absurd. She is Muslim. Her teammate and best friend, Amela, is Christian. When the Bosnian Serbs begin to wage their war of ethnic cleansing against the Muslims, Irena and her parents are brutalized and forced into hiding in her grandmother's apartment. Tedic is a Muslim man who, with a combination of psychological wiles and political conviction, recruits Irena to become a sniper in defense of her home and her people. He teaches her not to return to the same perch twice and, after firing, to search her targets for "mist" the grisly and unmistakable sign of a kill. Intensified by a daring visit from Amela and its terrifying results, this mortal chess game of guile and manipulation plays out against the backdrop of a beautiful, war-torn city. Scott Simon lived the siege of Sarajevo as a reporter. Everything in Pretty Birds is true the kind of dramatic truth that only fiction can tell.
Synopsis
This mortal chess game of guile and manipulation plays out against the backdrop of beautiful, war-torn Sarajevo as two high school friends one Muslim, one Christian struggle to survive the Serbs' ethnic cleansing.
About the Author
Scott Simon is the host of National Public Radio's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. He has covered ten wars, from El Salvador to Iraq, and has won every major award in broadcasting, including the Peabody and the Emmy. His memoir, Home and Away, rose to the top of the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestseller list. His second book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, was named Barnes & Noble's Sports Book of the Year. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.