We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day

A thriller of the ex-Yugoslavia Wars.The city of Vukovar, situated on Croatia's easternmost periphery, across the Danube River from Serbia, was the sight of some of the worst violence in the wars that rocked ex-Yugoslavia in the early '90s. It is referred to only as "the city" throughout this taut political thriller from one of Europe's most celebrated young writers. In this city without a name, fences in schoolyards separate the children of Serbs from those of Croats, and city leaders still fight to free themselves from violent crimes they committed—or permitted—during the war a generation ago. Now, it is left to a new generation—the children, now grown up, to extricate themselves from this tragic place, innocents who are nonetheless connected in different ways to the crimes of the past. Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion—a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her...