the cellist of sarajevo

This is a novel about whether beauty can hold a city together while it's being shelled apart. Galloway takes one true image—a cellist playing in a crater—and asks what that music does to the people who can hear it. Read it if you want war fiction that's mostly about the interior: fear, numbness, the small daily heroism of fetching water. It's short, spare, and it will make you think about what you'd refuse to become.

1. 1

   Act 1

   Twenty-Two Dead in a Breadline

   It's 4 p.m. on a spring day during the Siege of Sarajevo, and a mortar shell lands in a breadline outside a bakery. Twenty-two people die. From his apartment window, a cellist in his mid-fifties watches the aftermath, and he makes a decision: he will play Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor at the crater, once a day, for twenty-two days—one for each victim. He carries his cello and a stool down into the street. Elsewhere in the city, Arrow, a young woman sniper for the city's defenders, is given an assignment by her unit commander, Nermin: protect the cellist while he plays. She watches him through her scope. Arrow took her code name because she refuses to be the person her war has made her—the woman she was would not hate, and the name lets her separate herself from the killer she has become. Her real name never appears in the novel. Meanwhile Kenan, a middle-aged father, begins his trek across the city for water, for his family and for his elderly neighbor Mrs. Ristovski, hauling plastic jugs past the Holiday Inn and the Parliament building, running the intersections where snipers wait and counting his steps to keep his mind occupied. Dragan, a baker in his sixties who sent his wife and son out of the city, is trapped on the wrong side of a sniper-infested intersection. He meets his friend Emina while waiting to cross, and we learn his real battle: he's detaching from everyone, calculating risk, avoiding connection, because connection costs.

2. 2

   Act 2

   The Music Begins to Work

   The cellist plays Albinoni's Adagio at the crater for the first time, and Arrow watches from a window as the music transforms the street—people stop to listen despite the danger. Kenan reaches the brewery where water is distributed, waits in a long line, fills his jugs, and on the way back is forced to cross the intersection known as Sniper Alley, running with his heavy load. Dragan remembers the early days of the siege, when he put his wife Raza and their son on one of the last buses out of Sarajevo and stayed behind, certain the war would end quickly. On the seventh day of playing, Arrow spots an enemy sniper across the street—and holds her fire, because shooting would reveal her position and endanger the cellist. The restraint is the job. Arrow confronts Nermin about the morality of the assignment, and he tells her the cellist is a symbol of hope, that protecting him matters more than killing enemy soldiers. The music keeps pulling people back into being people: as the cellist plays while a funeral procession passes, Arrow notices a woman in the crowd weeping openly and feels a connection to the grief the music evokes. Kenan delivers water to Mrs. Ristovski, who thanks him and offers coffee, then lies to his wife Amila about the dangers he faced, shielding her from the full horror of the city. Dragan and Emina watch a man get shot by a sniper as he tries to cross their intersection; the body lies in the street and no one can retrieve it. Emina is horrified. Dragan feels numb, and the numbness frightens him more than the shooting does.

3. 3

   Act 3

   What the War Takes

   Kenan, on another water run, sees a dog feeding on a corpse in the street. He is sickened but forces himself to keep moving, focusing on the faces of his children waiting at home. Dragan returns to the bakery and learns that Stjepo's body has been taken; he decides to go back to his apartment, but on the way he sees a woman shot in the leg and helps carry her to a hospital. Then the book's cruelest turn: Emina is shot by a sniper while she and Dragan are crossing the intersection. Dragan drags her to cover, but she dies in his arms, and he blames himself for failing to protect her. The cost of connection, the thing he'd been avoiding all along, arrives anyway—and it's worse for having loved her. Arrow's own orders turn against her. Nermin tells her that if the cellist is targeted by enemy soldiers, she is to kill the cellist herself, to prevent the enemy from claiming a propaganda victory. She is horrified, but she agrees to the contingency. She tells him, in words that define her: "I'm not a soldier. I'm a person who shoots soldiers." On the twenty-first day, the cellist plays, and Arrow realizes she no longer hates the men on the hills the way she once did—the music has changed something in her. Kenan decides to stop lying to his wife about the horrors he sees; he tells Amila about the dog and the corpse, and they hold each other, sharing the burden of the truth.

4. 4

   Act 4

   The Twenty-Second Day

   Arrow tracks an enemy sniper she has nicknamed 'the man in the hat' through the destroyed city, a cat-and-mouse duel that ends when she kills him with a precise shot. Then the last day comes. The cellist plays Albinoni's Adagio at the crater for the twenty-second and final time. Arrow watches through her scope, her finger on the trigger, ready to shoot the cellist himself if enemy soldiers approach—her contingency order live in her hands. As the cellist finishes playing, she sees enemy soldiers advancing. In a split second she chooses: she fires at the soldiers instead of the cellist, breaking her orders and saving him. Then she drops her rifle and walks away from her position, knowing she can never return to her unit. She disappears into the city, and her fate is unknown. Dragan, after Emina's death, finally crosses the intersection and reaches the bakery where he works, and begins baking bread again, finding a small purpose in the routine. The cellist packs up his cello and walks home, unaware of Arrow's sacrifice, and the novel closes on him returning to his apartment, the music still echoing in the ruined streets: 'It was, if such a thing were possible, the sound of a life beginning again.'

Readers who want war fiction about the people holding the city together rather than the ones firing the guns. It's also for anyone who has ever gone numb to get through a hard stretch and wondered what it would cost to feel again.

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