War Torn - Hardcover

Marks, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573222542 ISBN 13: 9781573222549

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2003

Synopsis

A sequel to The Wall is set in post-Cold War Berlin and the former Yugoslavia and traces the love affair of a local woman and an American journalist who find themselves struggling for survival and changing their views about family and homeland loyalty in the face of the civil war outbreak in Mostar. 15,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

The former bureau chief of U.S. News & World Report in Berlin, where he lived for five years, John Marks is now a producer for 60 Minutes. He has written for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications, and is the author of the novel The Wall.

From Publishers Weekly

This complex, beautifully savage novel is well named, for every character in it is torn between past and present, between the promise of an adoptive country and the pull of a ruined homeland. Former U.S. News Berlin bureau chief Marks (The Wall) posits that the collapse of communism ("the greatest hangover of the twentieth century") in 1989 was but a prelude to yet another European apocalypse ("There was always this bloody shadow, this Bosnia.... The entire world is waiting to turn inside out") and illustrates his thesis in harrowing fashion. Arthur Cape, a Texan journalist working for a flagging American news magazine, is at a Halloween party in Berlin in the mid-1990s when a ghost from his past makes an appearance. George Markovic, an ailing war profiteer who helped Arthur first settle into Berlin at unification, now comes bearing news of Arthur's lost Bosnian love, Marta Mehmedovic, whom Arthur tried to save three years earlier after she followed her husband and son home to Mostar, a bitterly divided city in Bosnia. Galvanized, Arthur immediately plunges into a Balkan free-fire zone full of demons under different flags ("Arthur asked them who they were, and a host of cries rang out. They were Yugoslavs. They had fought the Germans. They had loved Tito. They were Croats, Muslims, Serbs, Jews and Italians. Who cared?"), searching for Marta, who has been trying to salvage the remains of her family, despite her sister's dangerous dalliance with a local warlord. The language here is deliberately biblical, as Marks repeatedly intones the end of history and Augustine's vision ("The division of a city is a form of living death experienced by only a few places on this earth. Mostar and Berlin are such cities.... It is our endless Augustinian sickness, the City of God against the City of Flesh"). Marks's rendering of the period pulls no punches (paramilitaries reign supreme, the U.N. an impotent afterthought), and every principal is wrenched between flickering and insubstantial poles.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1573222542
• ISBN 13: 9781573222549
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320