Like Eating a Stone: Surviving the Past in Bosnia by Wojciech Tochman (Portobello Books, £12.99)

In this harrowing, superlative work of witness, Polish journalist Tochman collects fragments of reportage from postwar Bosnia between 2000 and 2003, as mass graves are excavated and women try to find out what happened to their husbands or children. We begin in a village cultural centre, where relatives are examining clothes that might have belonged to their dead, and one woman is shown a jawbone that could, she agrees, be her father's; from there we move to Sarajevo and Srebrenica, the uncovering of new bones in pits, and suburbs where people do nothing all day but sit with their hands on their knees, staring into space. Interspersed with these snapshots of aftermath are survivors' accounts of rape, torture and murder.

The book's heroine, if she may be called that, is the tireless forensic anthropologist Ewa Klonowski, who directs the recovery and classification of human remains. Her importance is summed up by one despairing survivor: "If there aren't any bones there's no mourning. There's no way to live." Tochman hews closely to physical detail, logistics, and the stories of his interviewees. The prose, in Antonia Lloyd-Jones's translation, is devastatingly simple and lucid, relying on the cumulative force of declarative sentences, uncommented quotation, and lists. Such a book could be written in no other way.

see also: http://www.englishpen.org/writersintranslation/supportedtitles/likeeatingastone/

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Like-Eating-a-Stone/Wojciech-Tochman/e/9781934633144/#TABS

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