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.

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.