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The World and All That It Holds

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The World and All That It Holds

By: Aleksandar Hemon
Narrated by: Aleksander Mikic
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About this listen

The epic, cross-continental tale of a love so strong it conquers the Great War, revolution, and even death itself.

As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his father. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum, a summer stroll and idle fantasies can’t put in perspective.

And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller and Pinto’s protector and lover.

Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches and find themselves entangled with spies and Bolsheviks. As they travel over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman that will truly survive.

©2023 Aleksandar Hemon (P)2023 Macmillan Audio
Fiction Literary Fiction World War I War

Critic Reviews

A staggering work of beauty and brutality (Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize winning author of Shuggie Bain)

A tour de force. Hemon has given us a story of love and war like no other (Kamila Shamsie, author of Home Fire)

A twisting, turning epic rooted in love in all its forms; an odyssey of statelessness; a haunted museum of history ranging from Sarajevo to Shanghai and Jerusalem . . . This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon’s masterpiece (David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas)

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Osman and Pinto

There are real stories that seem fictional and fiction that feels real, I guess this marvel is a bit of both. Equally filled with love and despair, fiction and crude reality. I was a bit taken aback at the beginning due to the prose, time jumps and different untranslated languages, but at the end realised it could have not been any other way. I will be thinking about this book and it's characters for a long time. I wish the narrator would have actually sang all the songs in the story!

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