A really interesting take on the refugee narrative. I found it all a little relentless - the opium addiction, the poverty, the destruction of homeland - but ultimately rewarding. I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a talk given by the author which I think elevated the overall reading experience. Definitely one I'd read again and recommend.

This is a dark read. It is filled with pain and suffering. There is so much love between the pages. It is written so well and the characters are amazing.

Gosh - utterly beautiful. I could read this again and again and again. Beautifully written - literary fiction with a wonderfully romantic core

This book was an epic story and I loved the characters and the development. Sometimes it was a little tricky to follow, but I felt connected to what was happening. I don't think it's a read everyone will enjoy - but it's worth checking out!

This novel ranges across the 20th century, from Sarajevo, Tashkent to Shanghai, following the life of Pinto a Sephardic Jew, his lover and their daughter across the First World War, the Russian revolution and the Chinese Communist revolution.

Aleksandar Hemon creates a compelling narrative in under explored worlds, early on there a a few 'Zelig' moments in Sarajevo (you can probably guess the event) and the story moves quickly, with evocative descriptions of the chaos and human impact of the turmoil at the beginning of the 20th century.

The only element that pulls you out of the book are the numerous quotes in local languages which leaves the reader with a dilemma, do you copy and paste them into Google translate or move on with the story? If the phases are important to the author, perhaps translating them in an appendix would help inform the reader.

Overall, this book is highly recommended and will take you into a rarely travelled world.

I did not find this an easy read. I don’t mind being challenged in my reading, and I made sure to read it slowly and attentively – which is the only way to read such a complex and multi-layered novel – but even so I couldn’t quite enter into the narrative. It’s the story of lovers Osman, a Muslim, and Pinto, a Sephardic Jew, and their odyssey through much of the 20th century – even after one of them is killed. Conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army when WWI breaks out, life becomes for them dangerous, devastating and deadly. Wide-ranging in its themes and equally wide-ranging in history and geography, it’s a road novel, an immigrant story, a family story, a love story, incorporating all the twists and turns of a tumultuous century. Much of the novel follows Pinto’s wanderings, swept along as he is by the fortunes of war, and his enduring love for Osman. It should have been an outstanding novel, and many have found it so, but I just couldn’t relate to it, and even though I could appreciate its merits it would appear that it simply wasn’t a book for me.

The World and All That It Holds is a historical novel that spans decades, following the love of two men during the first world war and beyond. It’s a novel that I had high-ish hopes for and, as therefore might be surmised by the rating, it’s one that let me down on that front.

The story starts just before the first world war, in fact, on the day that Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo. Then we skip ahead a few years and find our main character already established in this relationship that is to be so central to the book. This, then, might be the first issue for me: that there is no chance to see the relationship’s development on page. Why is our main character so in love with Osman? Why is this love the driving force throughout the book? In a sense, you might expect this, given that the book is framed as a secondhand story told to a third party. That might explain the certain feeling of being held at arms’ length, but I feel there are still ways in which you can show the development of a relationship, primarily among which would be showing the start and growth of it on page.

Perhaps this was, inadvertently, some kind of foreshadowing. This two year timeskip, between the start of the war and the first scene between the main character and his love interest-slash-driving force, was only a harbinger of more, and longer ones, to come. Of course, if you have a book you want to span decades, it makes sense that you’re going to need timeskips. Only, they happened at the oddest of times, sometimes even feeling like mid-scene (and it would then be revealed in a later time, just how that scene had ended). Maybe this was simply a stylistic choice, but it’s one that I didn’t get along with particularly.

But both of these aspects gave way in the end to the real sticking point for me and that, an unavoidable subject given the era this was set in, was surrounding the occupation of Palestine. I say unavoidable because here we have a story that spans 1948, that features Jewish main characters, that is, quite centrally, about exile, homeland and ties to homeland. But, for all that, there is scarce mention of an event that caused the biggest proliferation of refugees in the 20th century. There are a couple of comments at the end (which, coincidentally but not, takes place in Jerusalem, as it turns out most of the Bosnian Jewish characters have settled there, including our storyteller), which are, at best, equivocal. There is a single mention of the Nakba — not by name — as merely the following:

I ended up in this country [Israel]. It was new back then, a country of refugees, that created even more refugees.

While I suppose this is not inaccurate in the vaguest of senses, it obscures a hell of a lot more. The absolute best I can say about this book is that it both-sides the situation, although it might be quite a stretch even to say that. Let me give you a little rundown of it quickly, and maybe you can see for yourself.

1. The mention of Palestine as a final destination which about-to-die Jewish folks are travelling to, and calling it “home.” [And he would explain to Osman who Rabin Danon had been; how he’d known it was his time to die so he’d set out to walk to Palestine and die there, but had never made it past Stolac; and how the Sarajevo Sefaradim liked to say that a Jew is always on his way home but never makes it there.]

2. The ending taking place at a literary festival described thusly: The event was a panel entitled Writing, War, Suffering; I was to discuss with an Israeli and a German the ways of writing about war and suffering, on which we were presumably experts. This might, at a push, sound tongue-in-cheek. At a push.

3. This quote: There were in fact very few Jews left in the city—most of those who survived the Shoah had already migrated to the newborn Israel. Quickly, “newborn” how?

4. The above quote about a “country of refugees, that created even more refugees”.

5. The ultimate both-sides quote: There is no world, it occurred to me, in which everyone wins or nobody loses. Spoken during the part below.

6. Right at the end, the narrator sits in a coffee shop waiting for the storyteller to come and tell the rest of her tale, watching the television, when he comments on seeing the IOF dragging an Arab family out of their home. This is when the “no world (...) in which everybody wins or nobody loses” quote happens.

7. Also at this point he hears an explosion, which I suppose is meant to be a terrorist attack? Worth noting that this, the comment about refugees, and the description of the IOF are the only times you get mentioned anyone else who might be living in this land. To all intents and purposes, this land on which you get “newborn Israel” is entirely deserted, going by this book.

To be fair to this book for a moment, this isn’t a story about the settler-colonial state that is Israel. This is a book about a Bosnian Jewish character who is exiled from his homeland— oh, wait. Can we see some similarities here? The Nakba and the creation of this state is probably one of the most defining events of the 20th century. For certain, it’s hardly something you can avoid touching upon when you elect to have a Jewish main character. Only, that is what seems to have happened here: there are simply the vaguest of allusions to it, culminating in a shoddy attempt to both-sides it all.

Ultimately, then, this is what let me down most about the book. A historical novel that chooses to ignore this event and yet its consequences become a centre of the storyline (everyone ends up in Israel, after all)? Well, I suppose it’s a good thing this book is shelved as fiction then.

An epic tale which sprawls across the 20th Century - from Sarajevo to Shanghai

I enjoyed the World War I parts of the novel - the eye witness account of the moment that not just 20th Century history but also the life of the protagonist was turned upside down, and the clever mix of tender love scenes and visceral war scenes in the trenches.

But I felt the novel lost its way after that with the protagonist involved in too many different eras/incidents and a rather bewildering series of characters; and I did not really like the meta-fictional conceit of either the British spy major (whose credibility as a character was rather damaged with the early claim that he was manouvering to be Prime Minister in 1946 which I struggled to tie to any reality) or of the narrator and epilogue. I am also not a fan of ghosts in novels

Still some great writing and I think for many readers the central three characters will also be a strong draw.

Beautiful, poetic, poignant, devastating, The World and All That It Holds is the first Aleksandar Hemon novel I’ve read. I’ve read and loved plenty of his non-fiction – the fantastic (and also devastating) Book of My Lives, opinion pieces and book extracts, most notably one about the importance of bread in our culture (we both come from Bosnia). I’ve held him in such high regard for years as a storyteller and chronicler of our place, time and generation that I slightly worried his actual fictional stories wouldn’t measure up. I am now ordering all of his fiction, The World and All That It Holds is easily one of the best books I’ll read all year.

The World and All That It Holds is a love story, a story of statelessness and home, migration and belonging. The novel’s main character, Rafael Pinto, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo is made stateless, a refugee in the aftermath of WWI and Bolshevik revolution and spends most of his life looking for a way home. That ‘home’ is no longer the Sarajevo he knows or even believes exists – he was conscripted into Austro-Hungarian army, after the Great War Sarajevo became a part of Yugoslavia, a name and a state as foreign to Pinto as the Taklamakan Dessert he finds himself traversing or the city of Shanghai where he ends up on the eve of Japanese invasion. There are two constants in his life, his love for Osman, his fellow conscript from Sarajevo and his addiction to opium. It’s a beguiling, sensory read that draws you in but should come with a warning, there isn’t much relief from hardship and trauma. Nevertheless, Hemon is such a massive talent, I’m most grateful for Pan Macmillan for the ARC.

Hemon takes us from Sarajevo onto a war in the trenches, then as refugees in Eastern Europe and on and on to Asia and international Shanghai. This tour de force is a love story set against the backdrop of war but in the hearts of two men. Brave, glorious and unconventional, I highly recommend this book

The World and All That It Holds is a novel packed full of ideas, connections, references and allusions. It reminded me of David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, but more densely packed. I found the best way to read it was to let it flow over me and not to read it too closely, not trying to undersand every sentence, and what it meant, but following the plot and taking on some of the ideas. I’m sure there will be plenty of people who will read this book and understand every reference and make all the connections, but not that many. I enjoyed the story, but found it a difficult read. 4 stars for the plot and the ideas, 3 stars for my enjoyment.