Sarajevo Saga by Stefan Çapaliku by Stefan Çapaliku.
Price £ 12.99
ISBN: 978-1-912545-57-5
April 2024. A well-known Albanian writer arrives in Sarajevo for a one-month literary residency. By the next day, he realizes he has no real idea what to write about. At the same time, a photograph weighs heavily in his pocket, a portrait of four children, cousins,who had left Albania for Sarajevo during the aftermath of the First World War. Their names, and the shared surname Cukali, are handwritten on the back. Should he write about a writer’s creative paralysis, or should he trace the footsteps of a forgotten family history that began over a century ago in this very city, transforming his residency into a journey of excavation, longing, and ancestral memory?
“This is a truly thrilling and exciting story. Stefan Çapaliku is a master at setting the scene, dropping small details, inserting doubts like a stone in your shoe, something that causes initial discomfort but then grows in the narrator’s mind, until you are not sure if his fears and paranoia are overblown or entirely justified. And after leading you through the labyrinth of the city and its characters, both dead and alive, Stefan Çapaliku skilfully brings you to a surprising and unexpected dénouement.” Riveting Reviews
“For a novella with two distinct threads separated by the better part of a century (or are they?), Çapaliku manages to weave a fair amount of societal, cultural, and historical detail into both. The language is unadorned, the accounts necessarily spare..” Roughghosts: Surely somebody knows something,
“Yet interwoven in Lekë’s search is another story. A child at the end of WWI, Mikel Cukali escapes with his mother and siblings from Shkodër. In a twist of fate, the family winds up in Sarajevo, where they are taken in by a Jewish family. Told in broad strokes, their story takes them through WWII . . Çapaliku is out to subvert the story of the family quest.”
Eamon McGrath, Aysmptote Journal
