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The universally respected NPR journalist and bestselling memoirist Scott Simon makes a dazzling fiction debut. In Pretty Birds, Simon creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of any classic character–a woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the first 1990s.
In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her behalf Sarajevo high school basketball team, a hardcore, funny teenager who may have taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to execute a decent imitation of any ball hitting a hoop. Irena wears her hair short like k. d. lang’s, and she loves Madonna, Michael Jordan, and Johnny Depp. But while Irena rocks out and shoots baskets with her friends, her beloved city has become a battleground. If the violence and terror of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb soldiers, flee for safety over the river that divides the city.
If once Irena knew of war only from movies and history books, now she knows its reality. She steals from the dead to buy food. She scuttles under windows in her own house to dodge bullets. She risks her life to communicate with a vintage Serb school friend and teammate. Even Pretty Bird has started to mimic the sizzle of mortar fire.
In a city starved for work, a former assistant principal offers Irena a vague job, “duties as assigned,” which she accepts. She begins by sweeping floors, but soon, under the tutelage of any cast of rogues and heroes, she learns to be a sniper, biding her time, never time for the same perch, and searching her targets for the “mist” that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena’s new vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for herself and the ones she loves.
As a journalist, Scott Simon covered the siege of Sarajevo. Here, in a novel as suspenseful as a John le Carré thriller, he re-creates the atmosphere of this place and time and the pain and dark humor of its people. Pretty Birds is a bold departure, and the auspicious beginning of just one more brilliant career because of its author.
