A powerful, gripping novel that ranges across decades and continents, weaving together the 2004 tsunami with the civil war in Bosnia, They are Trying to Break Your Heart is a story of love keeping a light in the darkest of times and the personal becoming political.
In 1994, Marko Novak’s world is torn apart by the death of his best friend. Kemal Lekic, a young soldier in the darkest days of the Bosnian war, is killed in the shelling of their home town. But his body is never recovered. After the funeral, Marko flees to England, hoping to put his broken homeland, and the part he played in the loss of his friend, behind him.

In 2004, human rights researcher Anya Teal is following a tenuous lead in the hunt for a Bosnian man with blood on his hands. She is also clinging to the fragile hope that she can rebuild a relationship with her first love, William Howell.

When Anya invites Will to join her on a Christmas holiday in the Thai beach resort of Kao Lak, her motives are not entirely pure. She hopes the holiday will offer them the chance to unpick the mistakes of their past, but Kao Lak may also be home to the man Anya is looking for—a man with a much darker history.

What no-one can know, is that a disaster as destructive as a war is approaching, detonated in the sea-bed of the Indian Ocean. It is a disaster that will connect the fates of Marko, William and Anya, across the years and continents. In its wake, everything Marko thought he knew, will be overturned.