Michael D. O'Brien · 2007 · exile

Michael O'Brien's 2007 novel, eight hundred pages following one Croatian life from 1933 into the new century. Josip Lasta is twelve when his mountain village is destroyed and everyone in it killed. What follows is a mathematician, a poet, a prisoner on Goli Otok, an exile in New York, and finally an old man going home.

1. 1
   Rajska Polja

   The Fields of Heaven, a village high in the Bosnian mountains where his father teaches school - and where the first chapter is a boy being taken to see the Adriatic for the first time, before any of the rest of it happens.

2. 2
   Sarajevo

   After the massacre he comes down out of the mountains alone into a country under new management, and is educated into a system that requires him to say things he does not believe in order to study what he loves.

3. 3
   Goli Otok

   The Naked Island, Tito's prison camp on a bare rock in the Adriatic, where he is sent for a poem - stone-breaking, interrogation, and the men the prisoners call the wolves, in the section the book is named for.

4. 4
   Zagreb

   He escapes, and the escape costs him everything he has left in the country - and the second half of his life begins as a man with no papers moving west with nothing of his own but what he can remember.

5. 5
   New York

   Decades in Manhattan as a janitor who was once a mathematician, writing poems nobody reads and building a life among other exiles - the long middle of the book, and the part that is about endurance rather than horror.

6. 6
   Rajska Polja

   Croatia is free and an old man goes back to the valley where it started, to find the graves and the ruins and whatever is left - which is the Odyssey the whole novel has been shaped as, and it does not pretend it is easy.