They are Trying to Break Your Heart

October 17, 2016
Savill’s immersive debut brings together the Bosnian War of the 1990s and the 2004 Thai tsunami in an enthralling story about destruction and justice. In 2004, Anya is working for a human rights organization in London. Although her organization has shifted its focus from human rights abuses to returning refugees displaced during the Bosnian war, Anya can’t stop thinking about a rape of a Bosnian woman by soldiers during the war that was never investigated. Concurrently in Cambridge, Marko, a Bosnian immigrant, is haunted by the same incident and wonders whether his close friend, Kemal, really was guilty of participating in the rape. While investigating those involved in the incident, Anya hears that Kemal may not be dead, as previously reported, but instead living in a resort in Thailand. Combining work with pleasure, she travels to the resort for Christmas 2004 with William, her ex-boyfriend, in hopes of rekindling their romance. Early on, the story flashes back to the ’90s in Bosnia, revealing the childhoods of Marko, Kemal, and their friends, and also moves forward to post-tsunami 2005: William is mourning Anya, who died in the tsunami, and Marko is back in Bosnia for Kemal’s funeral. This intricate story weaves together disparate threads, jumping among times and locations in a hopscotch that builds suspense toward the revelation of what actually happened in Bosnia. By wedding together multiple story lines into a chaotic, satisfying whole, Savill skillfully depicts the aid workers, perpetrators, victims, and survivors involved in two blurry moments of international crisis.

October 1, 2016
A literary debut that connects the Bosnian civil war with the Indian Ocean tsunami, two horrific disasters a decade apart. Human rights researcher Anya Teal is trying to hunt down a man named Kemal Lekic 10 years after the 1990s war. She looks at the photo in the obituary that praises him as a war hero and thinks he's "handsome enough she had to remind herself of what he had done," deeds that early on the reader must guess at. Hed been a brigade commander from Stovnik in Bosnia, and hed been presumed killed in a heavy shelling. No one could find his body, and he was buried in an empty casket in 1995. Kemal's best friend, Marko Novak, considers him to be the hero who diedthe only one whose life made any sense of the war. But Anya follows plausible rumors that he survived and is living in Thailand in 2004. Conveniently, her old flame William Howell is an English teacher in Bangkok, and she hopes they can get together again. Anya has studied Bosnia and written a dissertation called Rape as a Weapon of War, and she wonders if Kemal was one of the rapists. Scenes move back and forth from postwar Bosnia to pre- and post-tsunami Thailand; just before the 2004 Boxing Day earthquake and massive concertina of energy in the ocean, Anya says to William in Kao Lak: I love that we can hear the sea. Back in Bosnia, Marko thinks, Ive lost my childhood, have you seen it anywhere? That sums up the sense of pointless loss that so many survivors of the Bosnian War must have felt. Little seems to happen in the storys early stages, and the pace overall does not leave the reader breathless. And readers may wonder what a five-page chapter about skateboarding is doing just before the books end, but its entertaining nonetheless. Savills first novel shows his deep compassion for and understanding of two earth-shattering events. Fans of British author William Boyd, take note.

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January 1, 2017

Ranging from the Balkan War of the 1990s to the early 2000s, and from Bosnia to Thailand, Savill's first novel traces the fates of four people linked by love and war. Anya Teal is a human rights researcher on the trail of Kemal Leki, a suspected Bosnian war criminal generally believed to have died during the war. Meanwhile, Kemal's close friend Marko Novak returns to Bosnia in 2005 after building a new life in England, seeking both his past and Vesna, Kemal's onetime girlfriend, with whom he had also been briefly involved. Anya's research leads her to believe that Kemal is alive in Thailand. She ventures there, inviting former boyfriend William, who runs a school in Bangkok, to join her for the Christmas holidays, with the hope of reviving their relationship. Fate will find the three of them at a beachside resort as the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004 hits. VERDICT Though billed as a literary thriller, this first novel is more thought-provoking than suspenseful, as Savill mixes the personal with the political in an exploration of complex interrelationships of guilt and innocence and how people survive under extreme circumstances. A vivid, memorable depiction of the intersection of individual lives with major events.--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

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