A fascinating and intricate novel, They are Trying to Break Your Heart by David Savill, is a must read.
Skipping between three decades and telling some of the heartache of the civil war in Bosnia and the 2004 tsunami, you are drawn into the lives and loves of Marko, Kemal, Anya and William.
You will not be disappointed when reading this powerful storyline.

This is an adult novel, serious, thoughtful and with important things to say. Savill is excellent on the chaos of the war in Bosnia and offers a narrative which is brutal and painful at the same time. Especially poignant is the contrast between the sense of home that so many characters feel for the country, and their inability to live there because of the past. This strand of the book is handled with enormous maturity and deftness.

Less successful, however, is the secondary plot of a woman working for a human rights organisation tracing war-time atrocities in Bosnia, and her tiresome attempt to get back together with her ex-boyfriend in Thailand in the run up to the tsunami. While parts of the Bosnian plot are allocated to this narrative, I found it intrusive and unnecessary, with lots of padding. I found myself eventually skimming these parts to get back to Bosnia.

The structure of the novel is fragmented in time, place and point of view - something which authors seem to think is still postmodern and innovative but actually appears in practically any novel we pick up now from the trashiest pot-boiler to something more literary like this. It makes the book feel like it's suffering from ADD and adds nothing to the story.
. Overall, then, this is veers from the truly excellent to the unnecessarily busy: when Savill is good, he's superb - a bit more streamlining and paring back would have kept the complications of the book in the moral sphere without having to also have a fidgety narrative and timeline.

Highly recommended all the same, and an author to watch.

To be posted on Amazon

A story of love and deep friendship set in the present but tracking back to the Bosnian War and the terrible tsunami of Boxing Day, 2004. There’s a mystery to be solved here too. Is this too much ground to cover? Perhaps, but the author makes a brave attempt here in what I found to be an ambitious, sometimes confusing but also highly impactful tale.

When we meet Englishman William he’s working at a school in Bangkok, he is clearly a damaged man. He’s lost the love of his life, Anya, and is struggling to cope with the here and now. Marco is a Bosnian, he lives in London but has travelled back to his home town where he will meet up with childhood friends and visit places that bring back clear visions of the war that blighted all their lives. Marco, too, has lost someone: his best friend, Kemal. Vesna was Kemal’s girl but there’s history with Marco too. How will this play out when they meet? And what of Kemal, was he a hero as most believe or something else? There are stories of women refugees raped and killed as the conflict neared its end – is Kemal implicated in these gruesome events?

I remember Yugoslavia as a favoured holiday destination in the 80’s. I never visited but many of my friends did and told of the crystal clear waters they swam in and beautiful towns and villages they saw. When war came to that area I was interested – well, it was on the news every night, so you certainly couldn’t ignore it – but confused. There seemed to be many factions involved and it wasn’t clear to me how the ethnic tensions had boiled over into all out war. This narrative assumes some knowledge of the conflict, so I’d advise any prospective reader to undertake some basic research if they are to get the most from it. The parts of the story set in and around the area of the conflict are dark and brooding and sometimes shocking. It did bring home to me how lucky I am to have been born after the two big wars that impacted my country in the last century.

The Indian Ocean tsunami is one of the two most horrific events I’ve witnessed in my lifetime - via television and the internet. The other, of course, being the 911 attacks in America. Here there is a slow build up as we learn, in excepts, that several of the main characters transpire to be in Kao Lac, Thailand over the fateful Christmas period. The whole book unfolds in a fractured, non-linear way so that we get to see the disaster unfold in small episodes. It’s a very effective way of maintaining the tension and when the waves finally hit it’s truly shocking – it’s very effectively done.

Overall, it’s a book that is both rewarding and frustrating. There were times I got lost in the detail or confused by the constant switching of perspective. But there were also moments of clarity and cohesion that reminded me that this is why I read.

My thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing and NetGalley for supplying an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The emotional, geographical and moral scope of They Are Trying to Break Your Heart is surprisingly large and, despite the complexities, powerfully compelling.

There are two major tales, one set in Bosnia during the war, and one in Thailand around the time of the Tsunami in 2004, but any attempt to reduce the plot does a disservice to the craft of the telling of these stories that unravel around formative relationships, those special people who shape how we see ourselves.

Anya is a human rights researcher who receives a call from her ex, William, for the first time since they split up three years ago. That tug to reconnect is there despite her anger and when she realises she could answer some questions about possible war crimes in Bosnia by visiting William in Thailand – something about a resort by the ocean that cropped up during a visit to a dead soldier’s ex-girlfriend – she uses her job as an excuse to follow her heart and gets on a plane.

Marko is a Bosnian living in Cambridge, England. He fled Bosnia after burying the man he considered to be his brother, the war hero Kemal Lekić. Kemal was killed in a devastating bomb attack on their hometown. As none of his remains were found they carried an empty coffin to the grave. But when he gets a call from his cousin explaining that Kemal’s body was found in Thailand after the tsunami, he returns to Bosnia to bury Kemal again and to unearth the truth about who Kemal became in the war and afterwards. It’s also an opportunity to see Kemal’s ex-girlfriend, Vesna, a woman Marko was once in love with.

And then there’s William. He runs an English language school in Bangkok but he’s living in a haze. He longs for the holiday with Anya to develop into something, but it’s 2004 and deep beneath the waves tectonic plates are shifting, building momentum for devastating upheaval that will tie all these lives together.

In telling the story like this, it feels like a thriller. Certainly, I turn the page in order to find out what really happened back in Bosnia, but there is so much more to this novel than that (this is a mere fraction of the tale that also explores, Karate, rape and miscarriage and includes a dizzying number of characters all somehow relevant to the novel’s themes). The different places are described with care and affection. I can see and feel the differences in terrain, the weight of the air and sun. I can also read the story as a narrative about learning to live with loss, loss of a home, loss of a loved one, loss of a sense of self. They Are Trying to Break Your Heart is all about how to put yourself back together in the face of tragedy be it personal or global. Understanding the story of your loss, carrying it like a beacon into the world, allows you to move with and beyond it.

It’s a powerful novel and quite how David Savill managed to juggle all these narratives and all these places and histories in a relatively short novel is staggering. They Are Trying to Break Your Heart is a phenomenal achievement; a beautiful, global, novel that will stay with you long after you finish reading the final page. Pre-order your copy now as it comes out in April this year.