Sarajevo's "Marlboro". Miljenko Jergovic

“Marlboros of Sarajevo” is a book about a city that lives to the accompaniment of explosions, but does not lose its humanity. In short, piercing stories, Milenko Jergović, who remained in Sarajevo during the brutal siege that horrified the whole world in the 1990s, shares with readers a special look at the very moment when numerous and so different lives changed forever. The heroes of the stories are ordinary people: married couples, friends, lovers, parents and children, or simply strangers brought together by the need to survive. They hide in bomb shelters, lose their own libraries and favorite bars, hastily pack their entire lives into tourist backpacks, but stubbornly try to preserve tiny fragments of normality. It is from these fragments — from familiar gestures, memory, mutual support — that hope gradually grows.