Author(s): Aleksandar Hemon

Gay & Bi Male Fiction | 2023 Staff Top Picks

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. 

Febuary 2023

Top 3 pick from Rowland
"This book begins in Sarajevo in 1914 when Pinto, a Bosnian Jew – cruising, high on laudanum and annoyed – is interrupted by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and ends during the Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1936. In trying to avoid the war that explodes over Europe, Pinto meets a mercenary Muslim soldier, Osman and they tentatively all in love. They travel from Sarajevo through the Carpathians, avoiding marauding White Russians and Bolshevicks until they arrive in Shanghai in 1936 during the Japanese bombing. The story is even more astounding after reading the author’s coda."