As a Bosnian who emigrated as a youth to the United States during the Yugoslav Wars, Ismet Prcic no doubt has plenty of trauma to unpack. Unspeakable Home reads as an autofictional account of just such a young man’s journey — containing stories of his shame-filled childhood, teenage years as a drunken orange-mohawked punk, a short-lived stint with his paternal uncle in California, and his college/young adult/married years with the Beloved — and the format is highly self-aware and unconventional by design. Prcic starts with a fan letter to the comedian Bill Burr, bemoaning his recent marital breakup ("You wonder whether she would have filed for divorce if, instead of PTSD and alcoholism, your diagnosis had been diabetes or cancer, if your maladies were visible, measurable, if they didn’t have to be communicated by words, if they didn’t have to be believed to be true.") and then proceeds to describe how he intends to write this novel as a sort of mix tape of two halves. Throughout, details are hinted at in these letters to Bill Burr, and then stories are told about those details, often from different angles, and by the end, an entire, trauma-filled life has been explored in a precisely crafted work of art that knowingly exposes the craftsmanship. I truly do admire Prcic’s craft, and I am grateful for what I learned here about the Bosnian war experience, but I don’t always perfectly connect emotionally with this kind of postmodern MFA-trained writing style: art is subjective, and while I can recognise the skill on display here, it wasn’t entirely to my own tastes; I will understand every five star review or award this garners.

I chose to request Unspeakable Home from NetGalley because I am working on an around-the-world reading challenge and still needed to read something written by an author from Bosnia. This book was a mixed bag for me. There were some really interesting moments and plenty of emotion; however, I often found the prose a little heavy going and my attention would waver at times. Overall, I struggled to connect with the book on a deeper level and occasionally found myself skim-reading. If you are interested in reading multicultural works about peoples’ real-life experience of war and displacement it is worth giving this book a try. However, for me it was a middle-of-the-road, three star read.