GIRL AT WAR

GIRL AT WAR is out from Random House  and Little, Brown UK,
​and is available or forthcoming in 13 more languages.

Find it at your local bookstore, Bookshop.org, Amazon, IndieBound, and Barnes and Noble.

Winner: American Library Association's Alex Award.
Finalist: LA Times Book Prize and Goodreads Choice Awards.
Longlist: Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, International Dublin Literary Award,
​and the Women’s Prize.
Named one of the year's best books by Booklist, Bookpage and Electric Literature.

Zagreb, 1991. Ana Jurić is a carefree ten-year-old, living with her family in a small apartment in Croatia’s capital. But that year, civil war breaks out across Yugoslavia, splintering Ana’s idyllic childhood. Daily life is altered by food rations and air raid drills, and soccer matches are replaced by sniper fire. Neighbors grow suspicious of one another, and Ana’s sense of safety starts to fray. When the war arrives at her doorstep, Ana must find her way in a dangerous world.

New York, 2001. Ana is now a college student in Manhattan. Though she’s tried to move on from her past, she can’t escape her memories of war—secrets she keeps even from those closest to her. Haunted by the events that forever changed her family, Ana returns to Croatia after a decade away, hoping to make peace with the place she once called home. As she faces her ghosts, she must come to terms with her country’s difficult history and the events that interrupted her childhood years before.

Moving back and forth through time, Girl at War is an honest, generous, brilliantly written novel that illuminates how history shapes the individual. Sara Nović fearlessly shows the impact of war on one young girl—and its legacy on all of us. It’s a precocious debut by a writer who has stared into recent history to find a story that continues to resonate today.

Critical Praise

“Outstanding . . . Girl at War performs the miracle of making the stories of broken lives in a distant country feel as large and universal as myth.”--The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

“[An] old-fashioned page-turner that will demand all of the reader’s attention, happily given. A debut novel that astonishes.”--Vanity Fair

A shattering debut . . . The book begins with what deserves to become one of contemporary literature’s more memorable opening lines. The sentences that follow are equally as lyrical as a folk lament and as taut as metal wire wrapped through an electrified fence.”--USA Today

“[A] gripping debut novel . . . [Sara] Nović, in tender and eloquent prose, explores the challenge of how to live even after one has survived.”--O: The Oprah Magazine

“Powerful and vividly wrought . . . Nović writes about horrors with an elegant understatement. In cool, accomplished sentences, we are met with the gravity, brutality and even the mundaneness of war and loss as well as the enduring capacity to live.”--San Francisco Chronicle

“Intimate and immense . . . [Nović is] a writer whose own gravity and talent anchor this novel.”--The New York Times

“Sara Nović’s powerful debut novel . . . is an important and profoundly moving reading experience. . . . It will be interesting to see if another novelist, particularly a first-time novelist, can match Nović’s bravura, gut-punching opening section. . . . Girl at War is a superb exploration of conflict and its aftermath.”--The National

“Astonishing . . . Girl at War is an extraordinarily poised and potent debut novel, a story about grief and exile, memory and identity, and the redemptive power of love.”--Financial Times

“Remarkable.”—Julia Glass, The Boston Globe

“[A] powerful, gorgeous debut novel.”—Adam Johnson, The Week

“One of this year’s most discussed debuts . . . What makes [Girl at War] unique is that it’s not concerned with unmasking the horrors of war, as many have repeatedly done. Instead, this book is an exploration of how humans grow, prosper and move on from unthinkable times.”--Paste

“Nović’s important debut brings painfully home the jarring fact that what happens in today’s headlines on a daily basis—the atrocities of wars in Africa and the Mideast—is neither new nor even particularly the worst that humankind can commit. Take it from ten-year-old Ana Jurić, conscripted into the Yugoslav civil war in the early 1990s by the bad luck of simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. . . . . As Nović gradually reveals, you can take the girl out of the war zone, but you can’t take the war zone out of the girl. By the time Ana becomes a student at a New York university, all that violence has been bottled up inside her head for a decade. Thanks to Nović’s considerable skill, Ana’s return visit to her homeland and her past is nearly as cathartic for the reader as it is for Ana.”--Booklist (starred review)

“Understated, self-assured . . . The tutelary spirits of W. G. Sebald and Rebecca West hover over the proceedings. . . . Elegiac, and understandably if unrelievedly so, with a matter-of-factness about death and uprootedness. A promising start.”--Kirkus Reviews

“[A] smart and insightful debut, which will please fans of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena or the essays of Aleksander Hemon . . . [Nović] ably conveys Ana’s plight, torn between two cultures and unable to feel at home in either one.”--BookPage

“Nović’s debut novel delivers a finely honed sense of what the bloodshed really meant for those who withstood it. . . . Nović’s heartbreaking book is all the more effective for its use of personal rather than sensational detail and will be embraced by a wide range of readers.”--Library Journal

“Set against the backdrop of the Bosnian Croat war, this vivid debut recalls Half of a Yellow Sun. Main character Ana’s journey from a ten-year-old tomboy to young woman will leave you reeling.”--Stylist (U.K.)