I mostly avoid novels about the horrific things that happen in war - the older I get, the lower my tolerance is for it in fiction, and it's hard enough to get my head around the news. But something about this made me give it a go, and I was really glad that I had.

I was about the protagonist's age when the Serbo-Croat war started - young enough that what caught my attention was less the complex political and religious circumstances than the displaced children on the news. I remember reading Zlata Filipović's diary of living under siege in Sarajevo. Now she's a documentary film-maker. Thanks to the elastic timelines of fiction, Sara Nović's book is not just about war coming to her character's city when she's 10, but also what happens a decade later, when Ana is a student in New York, and giving a presentation to the UN about her experience as a refugee complicates her attempts to live with the legacy of that time.

The first thing that struck me was how much Nović manages to say in a short book: I must've read it in a day and a half, but she makes every phrase and every image count. Horror does not need to be belaboured, but neither do the most vivid moments of a child's life - lying on a balcony looking out over Zagreb, looking after her baby sister, summers when everyone in the city flees to the coast, or (not an unfamiliar image for Belfast children of a certain age) playing amongst barricades.

It's also very convincing regarding trauma and how people integrate the best and worst parts of their past into their present. A war someone physically escapes - as Ana joins the US foster family of her sister, who was airlifted for medical treatment - doesn't stop being a factor in how they see the world. How do you deal with something like 9/11 when it's not your introduction to the idea that the world is fundamentally unsafe, but something horribly familiar?

For the First Lines game at the BC Christmas party!

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Caught at the 2016 Bookcrossing party.

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