No Stick nor Trace

Gabriele Annan

• The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living by Courtney Angela Brkic
  Granta, 316 pp, £12.99, October 2004, ISBN 1 86207 657 X
• This Was Not Our War: Bosnian Women Reclaiming the Peace by Swanee Hunt
  Duke, 307 pp, £21.50, January 2005, ISBN 0 8223 3355 4
• Then They Started Shooting: Growing Up in Wartime Bosnia by Lynne Jones
  Harvard, 336 pp, £18.95, February 2005, ISBN 0 674 01561 4

Angela Brkic’s The Stone Fields is subtitled ‘An Epitaph for the Living’, but its underlying and overwhelming theme is death – death in Bosnia. It is a chronicle of Brkic’s Bosnian Croat family, from the end of the First World War to the present day (Brkic’s father emigrated to the US in 1959 and she was born there). The emphasis is on war: the Second World War, but especially the wars between Serbs and Croats in Croatia and in Bosnia, after Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. The jumping about is confusing: other people’s family structures, almost always hard to take in, are especially difficult when the names are exotic and unfamiliar. Thoughtfully, Brkic has provided a family tree, as well as a map and a key to pronunciation. Even so, it might have been better to begin with her grandparents and work up to her own arrival in the Balkans at the age of 22.