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Garden, Ashes
Danilo Kiš
Novel, 1965. Translated from Serbian
A boy's childhood in wartime Vojvodina shows the Pannonian plain, a Jewish family's fate and the Holocaust in rural Serbia and Hungary.
Books set in Serbia
Eight books by writers from Serbia, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Garden, Ashes and The Houses of Belgrade.
About the literature of Serbia
Serbia's oldest storytelling tradition is the epic song, sung to the one-stringed gusle, with the Battle of Kosovo of 1389 as a central subject. Serbian is written in both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, and Belgrade and Novi Sad recur as settings in modern fiction. Much twentieth-century writing is shaped by the two world wars, the Holocaust and the wars of the 1990s.
Danilo Kiš's Garden, Ashes tells of a boy's childhood in wartime Vojvodina and a Jewish family's fate. Aleksandar Tišma's The Use of Man portrays Novi Sad before, during and after the Second World War. David Albahari's Leeches gives a paranoid Belgrade monologue from the Milošević years. Vesna Goldsworthy, who writes in English, recalls socialist-era Belgrade and later exile in Chernobyl Strawberries.
By writers from Serbia
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The Houses of Belgrade
Borislav Pekić
Novel, 1970. Translated from Serbian by Bernard Johnson
Belgrade's streets and houses frame a story of the city's turbulent 20th-century history, from the interwar years through occupation and communism.
The Use of Man
Aleksandar Tišma
Novel, 1976. Translated from Serbian by Bernard Johnson
Multiethnic Novi Sad before, during and after the Second World War, including the Hungarian occupation and the destruction of its Jewish community.
A Time of Death
Dobrica Ćosić
Novel, 1972. Translated from Serbian
A sweeping novel of Serbia in 1914, following peasants, soldiers and politicians through the first months of the First World War.
Leeches
David Albahari
Novel, 2005. Translated from Serbian
A Belgrade narrator's paranoid monologue captures the city's atmosphere of nationalism and mistrust in the 1990s Milošević years.
In the Hold
Vladimir Arsenijević
Novel, 1994. Translated from Serbian by Celia Hawkesworth
Young Belgraders in a squalid flat drift through the 1990s, shaped by sanctions, war and hopelessness.
Chernobyl Strawberries
Vesna Goldsworthy
Memoir, 2005
A memoir of growing up in socialist-era Belgrade and later life in exile, with the Yugoslav family and city at its heart.
When Pumpkins Blossomed
Dragoslav Mihailović
Novel, 1968. Translated from Serbian by Drenka Willen
A teenage narrator's slangy voice captures working-class Belgrade in the 1960s, with its street life and poverty.
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