商品簡介
A Bosnian War orphan of Muslim heritage escapes his homeland, finds a new family in New England, and learns to deal with his trauma--and years later falls into the depths of post-9/11 America's extraordinary rendition program. A piercing and resonant debut novel about war and the endurance of the human spirit.
The Solace of Trees tells the story of Amir, a young boy of secular Muslim heritage who witnesses his family's murder in the Bosnian War. Amir hides in a forest, mute and shocked, among refugees fleeing for their lives. Narrowly escaping death while wandering through rural Bosnia, he finds sanctuary in a UN camp. After a charity relocates him to the United States, the retired professor who fosters Amir learns that the boy holds a shameful secret concerning his parents' and sister's deaths.
Amir's years in the US bring him healing and a loving place in a new family. In college he falls in love?and he accepts the request of a professor of Islamic studies to edit a documentary film on the plight of Palestinians. 9/11 comes, and with it, the arrest of the professor for his ties to terrorist organizations. As Amir enters adulthood, his destiny brings him full circle back to the darkness he thought he'd forever escaped.
For fans of Sara Novic's Girl at War, Kenan Trebincevic's The Bosnia List, and Steven Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo.
作者簡介
Robert Madrygin, who grew up as the son of a US military lawyer, has experienced the meaning of culture, ethnicity, and language from many perspectives. When he was an infant, his family moved to postwar Japan as his father worked to defend the rights of Japanese prisoners of war. Japanese became his preferred language, for which he was bullied on returning as a child to California. From there he moved again, taken in by his Polish grandmother in New Jersey. A succession of schools followed before he went abroad once more with his father's reposting to Morocco, Franco-ruled Spain, and Paris. His was a childhood that bred the seeds of a lifelong traveler who left home at sixteen, working his way through Europe as a laborer and later to Alaska, fishing in remote stretches of the Bering Sea. As an adult Madrygin moved with his wife and three children to Ecuador and Barcelona for three years each. He built a successful business and yet made time to work in India managing a worldwide holistic conference and in post-Tsunami Thailand. In spring 2017 he will visit Bosnia and Herzegovina. All of this travel fueled his thirst for writing, with the compassion of someone who has lived both in and outside of cultures besieged by complex challenges. He and his wife live currently in Brattleboro, Vermont.
