My Heart

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Intelligent, honest, and full of heart, My Heart is an intimate work of autobiographical fiction by one of ex-Yugoslavia's greatest writers about his family's experience as refugees from the Bosnian war--a timeless story of love, memory, and the resilience of the human spirit that has all the qualities one might seek in a friend (Etgar Keret, author of The Seven Goods Years).

Today, it seems, was the day I was meant to die. When a writer suffers a heart attack at the age of fifty, he must confront his mortality in a country that is not his native home. Confined to a hospital bed and overcome by a sense of powerlessness, he reflects on the fragility of life and finds extraordinary meaning in the quotidian. In this affecting autobiographical novel, Semezdin Mehmedinovic explores the love he and his family have for one another, strengthened by trauma; their harrowing experience of the Bosnian war, which led them to flee for the United States as refugees; eerie premonitions of Donald Trump's presidency; the life and work of a writer; and the nature of memory and grief.

Poetically explosive and pure to the core, My Heart serves as a kind of mirror, reflecting our human strengths and weaknesses along with the most important issues on our minds--love and death, the present and the past, sickness and health, leaving and staying.

Author: Semezdin Mehmedinovic
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 03/09/2021
Pages: 240
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9781646220076
ISBN10: 1646220072
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Biographical
- Fiction | Family Life | Marriage & Divorce
- Fiction | Literary

About the Author
Semezdin Mehmedinović was born in 1960 in Kiseljak near Tuzla. He studied comparative literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo. A poet and an essayist, Mehmedinović has held the position of an editor in newspapers, weeklies, as well as on the radio and television. He has edited a number of culture magazines and has been involved in the film industry. Sarajevo Blues and Nine Alexandrias have been published among his other works. Since 1996, he has been living in the United States.