Nowhere Man

Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Question of Bruno, one of the most celebrated debuts in recentAmerican fiction, returns with the mind- and language-bending adventures of hisendearing protagonist Jozef Pronek.

A native of Sarajevo, where he spends his adolescence tryingto become Bosnia’s answer to John Lennon, Jozef Pronek comes to the UnitedStates in 1992—just in time to watch war break out in his country but too earlyto be a genuine refugee. Indeed, Jozef’s typical answer to inquiries about hisorigins and ethnicity is, “I am complicated.”

And so he proves to be—not just to himself, but to therevolving series of shadowy but insightful narrators who chart his progressfrom Sarajevo to Chicago; from a hilarious encounter with the first PresidentBush to a somewhat graver meeting with a heavily armed Serb whom he hasbeen hired to serve with court papers. Moving, disquieting, and exhilarating inits virtuosity, Nowhere Man is thekaleidoscopic portrait of a magnetic young man stranded in America by the warin Bosnia.