The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon

He was sent to Tashkent from India to Turkestan, which was part of the Russian Empire at the time, to see what was going on with the trouble in mainland Russia. I don’t remember the moment of inception, but I remember that the thing that made me start thinking about it was a memoir by a British spy, Frederick Bailey. In some ways, this is a World War I novel, but it’s really so much more than that.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. Hemon spoke about his new novel - and other projects - via Zoom from Princeton. in the early 1990s, learning English in the States and publishing his first short story in the language just a few years later. It’s something of a personal novel for Hemon, a Sarajevo native who moved to the U.S.

The two do their best to survive the battlefields of World War I, and the uncertain worlds that come after, as the narrative shifts from Europe to central Asia to China. Pinto is conscripted into the army, where he meets and falls in love with Osman, a charming Muslim soldier. Related: Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and moreīut through all that, his mind was never far from “The World and All That It Holds.” The novel follows Pinto, a Jewish pharmacist in Sarajevo whose life is changed forever when Archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in his hometown in 1914. He read “shelves and shelves” of history books while writing the novel, and still kept busy with other jobs - in the years since he started it, he published four other books wrote scripts with his friends Lana Wachowski, the filmmaker, and David Mitchell, the novelist and moved to New Jersey, where he’s now a professor of creative writing at Princeton University. The author first wrote the proposal for the book in 2010, but soon realized that the century-spanning epic would take a great deal of research. Aleksandar Hemon’s latest novel, “The World and All That It Holds,” was 13 years in the making.

The World and All That It Holds by Aleksandar Hemon