LITTLE BASTARDS IN SPRINGTIME

A moving debut novel that manages to squeeze beauty out of the darkness of the everyday during wartime and the bittersweet peace that follows.

Spring, 1992. Jevrem Andric is eleven years old and war is erupting in Sarajevo. At first it's merely boring, as kids shut in apartments run out of ways to entertain themselves. As the shelling worsens and Jevrem's father and brother join the Bosnian army, he and his sisters hole up in the basement where his grandmother tells them stories about her partisan past. Only a few weeks later boredom is a luxury. Multi-ethnic for centuries, Bosnia is on its way to being partitioned along ethnic lines, and Jevrem's world has collapsed in ruins around him. Spring, 1997. Sixteen-year-old Jevrem is newly arrived in Toronto. He and his small gang of Yugoslav refugee friends spend their nights smoking weed, popping pills, breaking into nearby houses and brutalizing their unsuspecting inhabitants. It's an adrenaline rush that reminds them of the chaos of home, where Jevrem's father, brother, and sister lie buried in the parks of their hometown. Meanwhile, Jevrem's surviving sister feverishly overachieves, his mother, once a renowned concert pianist, cleans houses, and his ailing grandmother exhorts Jevrem to do some good for once. Or so he imagines. When she dies, and much to the disgust of his gang, Jevrem becomes driven by an obsessive compassion, and when he is eventually picked up by police, it is for breaking into an elderly neighbor's house to deliver groceries and fix her fence. Spring, 1998. After a year in remand, Jevrem is sentenced to three years of juvenile detention, where he is once again confined and surrounded by violence. Initially targeted by a gang, he retaliates, and soon he's feared as the most violent of them all. Taking advantage of his first opportunity to escape, he makes his way west through American farmland, desert, and mountain toward an estranged uncle in Los Angeles. Hitching rides with long haul truckers, he wonders whether it's possible to save his own soul. What he will discover is that he has come much further than he knows. KATJA RUDOLPH was born in England, raised in Canada, and earned an MPhil from King's College, Cambridge. The daughter of German immigrants, German was her first language. This is her first novel.