Oh wow..

This book starts in the 1984 in Bosnia during the Winter Olympics. There, Gemma who is visiting from Italy meets people she will cherish for the rest of her life - Gojko the poet, and Diego the photographer who ends up becoming the love of her life. During their relationship, Diego and Gemma cherish Bosnia as a place where it all started and end up in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War.
16 years later, Gemma returns with her 16-year-old son Pietro, to introduce him to the city he was born in - and escaped from at only a few hours old. While revisiting the city of her heart, Gemma is torn between the present and the past, memories of love and of war, and her conflicting emotions and devastating journey of motherhood.

CW: Infertility struggles, miscarriage, sexual assault.

This book was something else, and I don't think I will forget it for a long, long time. I felt so tense when I was reading this, and I really felt the emotions spilled out onto the pages between Gemma and Diego and all the things said and unsaid between them. The journey in this book - both Gemma's life with Diego and her life with Pietro - is fascinating, and at times it's so hard to watch knowing the disaster that awaits with war on the horizon.

The brutality of war is never shied away from in this book, and while it can certainly be hard to figure out why Diego and Gemma stayed in the middle of a war zone when they could travel home to Italy at any time, I still appreciated learning so much about a war that was happening when I was born, and one I know very little about.

There is death and destruction in this book that can be hard to read - the death of children playing football or sledding in the snow - picked off like rabbits in a field by snipers on the hill. The death of an old man who was tired of war and walked across a bridge, knowing he would be seen and shot dead.

There are also some traumatic and graphic descriptions of rape and sexual assault in this book as a lot of Muslim women were kept in concentration camps and repeatedly raped by soldiers. (Reminder that this only happened less than 30 years ago at the time of writing).

Gemma's personal journey of motherhood in this book was so hard to read at times as she suffers from all the highs and lows that come with trying for a baby, and dealing with fertility struggles. Gemma as a character is a hard one to crack to be honest, as a lot of us getting to know her as a reader is through her inner monologue and thoughts rather than actions she takes. There's a lot of times I felt frustrated with her as I felt she was just moving along with the tide, almost blinded by everything except Diego and at times she let herself be a doorstop.

I honestly thought I had everyone figured out in this book, and I was honestly raging over characters' decisions and stomping around when the story completely flipped itself and my rage turned to utter despair over the truth of the characters' journeys.

There are some wonderful passages in this book, and descriptions of Bosnia and parts of Croatia (Dubrovnik).

I do really wish in a way that I could be fluent in Italian and have read this as it was written. I felt the writing style a bit jarring at the start - I believe because of the translation and it took a while for my mind to adapt to the way the story was written in English. I don't think everything came across as beautifully as it probably did in Italian, and there were some passages that read a bit awkwardly.

The first 100 pages of this book as well are definitely the hardest to get through as it's mainly just a big build up to Gemma and Diego's life together. Once they are together, the story really begins to flow and then it just becomes utterly addictive.

Prepare to sigh at young love, cry in shared grief, rage in despair and finally forgive with compassion alongside these characters.