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by David Savill
A powerful, gripping novel that ranges across decades and continents, weaving together the 2004 tsunami with the civil war in Bosnia, They are Trying to Break Your Heart is a story of love keeping a light in the darkest of times and the personal becoming political.
In 1994, Marko Novak's world is torn apart by the death of his best friend, Kemal, a young soldier in the darkest days of the Bosnian war. After the funeral, Marko flees to England, hoping to put his broken homeland, and the part he played in the loss of his friend, behind him.
In 2004, human rights researcher Anya Teal is following a tenuous lead in the hunt for a Bosnian man with blood on his hands. She is also clinging to the fragile hope that she can rebuild a relationship with her first love, William Howell. When Anya invites Will to join her on a Christmas holiday in the Thai beach resort of Khao Lak, she hopes the holiday will offer them the chance to unpick the mistakes of their past. But Khao Lak may also be home to the man Anya is looking for - a man with a much darker history.
What nobody knows is that a disaster as destructive as a war is approaching, detonated in the seabed of the Indian Ocean, one that will connect the fates of Marko, William, and Anya, across the years and continents. In its wake, everything Marko thought he knew will be overturned.
"Savill's first novel shows his deep compassion for and understanding of two earth-shattering events. Fans of British author William Boyd, take note." - Kirkus
"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." - Publishers Weekly
"Tense and powerful ... Faultless ... Savill sidesteps the easy answers or received wisdoms about the labyrinthine, internecine war ... They are Trying to Break Your Heart triumphs" - Times Literary Supplement (UK)
This information about They Are Trying to Break Your Heart was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Savill lived as a teacher and a student among the refugees of Srebrenica in the last year of the Bosnian war. He worked for eight years as a BBC Current Affairs journalist on a number of programs. In 2004, he arrived on the beaches of Phuket two days after the Indian Ocean tsunami. He spent the next six months in Thailand and Sri Lanka, where he made two documentaries about the aftermath of the disaster. David now has two children and teaches creative writing at St. Mary's University, London. This is his first novel.
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