The London-based Calvert Journal included the novel ‘Quiet flows the Una’, by Bosnian writer Faruk Sehic, among its picks for the “100 of the best books from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia available in English.”

With his book being included on the list, Sehic found himself in the company of great writers, including Nobel laureates such as Ivo Andric, Svetlana Alexievich, Czeslaw Mislosz. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and many others.

“Quiet flows the Una, Sehic’s first novel, is a beautiful and scorching exploration of war trauma, and the consequent explosion of the self. Awarded the European Union Prize for Literature in 2013, its power lies in the tension between the personal experience of conflict, and its wider resonance,” wrote Madeleine Nosworthy.

She praised the novel’s “complex, bold prose” which “hits deep and unexpectedly straight from the opening of the book.”

“The thoughts of the Bosnian war veteran and poet flow like a river, a sort of meditation, drifting as memory does through various periods of his life. His rich, lyrical vocabulary takes the reader through a maze of visions from his past, as if to archive them, and make sense of the fracture of his identity. The river’s presence is constant, with the stone from its bed even forming the walls of his grandmother’s house,” she wrote.

The Calvert Journal is a digital magazine of contemporary New East culture, including art, film, architecture, design, fashion and avant-garde culture. It was founded in 2013 by the Calvert 22 Foundation, a London-based NGO that focuses on contemporary culture and creativity in 29 Eastern European countries, Russia, The Balkans and Central Asia.