150/2020. I wasn't going to review this but as there are no other reviews yet and it was published in 2017....

This is Naomi Hamill's first "novel" although this isn't a "novel" as advertised but actually a collection of three short stories split into fragments and interspersed with vignettes. This is an interesting and difficult choice of structure but the author makes it work. Unfortunately the prose style, describe in the blurb as "sparse and repetitive" is simplistic and repetitive and repetitive, like an early reading book for learning English as a foreign language, which may be intentional by the author but is tedious to read while also flattening and infantilising the characters.

The vignettes are all set during and immediately after the war in Kosovo in 1998-99 and present similar situations to those I've seen described by local people but the selection here glosses over the worst violence and horror, which occurs offstage when it's acknowledged at all. The three fragmented short stories are a retelling of an Albanian folktale, The Maiden in the Box (which you can find online), and two parallel stories of young Kosovan women in which one is unhappily married and the other is a student.

There's not much else to say about this book, except that I personally found it felt at least mildly exploitative which I'm sure is the opposite of the author's intention. There are, of course, other books that were written by local people about conflicts in the former Yugoslavia or about Albania. I've personally read and especially appreciated the novel How the Soldier Repaired the Gramophone by Sasa Stanisic about the Bosnian War, and also Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones about womanhood in Albanian tradition, but the available choices are much wider. ( )