Where the Soil Remembers

How is it possible to go on living when there is nothing to live for? How can you find beauty in this ugly world? From the spring of 1992, approximately 100,000 people were killed as Yugoslavia collapsed and disintegrated. Bosnian Muslims were systematically removed and massacred. Selma survived. Her husband and young daughter did not. Selma's Australian cousin, Damir, helped extract her and bring her to Sydney where she has built a seemingly perfect life complete with a new husband and child. She has buried her loss, her grief, and the guilt of having survived. She has become a different person, far away from the Selma who loved, lost and witnessed the horrors of humanity. However, the news of the trial of alleged Bosnian Serb war criminal Borislav Simic shatters Selma's carefully constructed world. She fails at her job, her family, and barely escapes causing her own death. Selma realises that she must return to Bosnia. She needs to unlock her past to grieve, to reconcile with the unimaginable, so she can forgive and find compassion within herself and her past. AUTHOR: Vahida Berberovic is a writer of contemporary fiction and teacher of English and Communications. She is a refugee from Bosnia, and her writing explores displacement, the patriarchy and the quiet resilience of survivors shaped by war. She has been awarded an international writing residency at the Vermont Studio Center and a writing residency at the Varuna: the National Writers' House. Her fiction and poetry have been published in a range of literary magazines and anthologies. Vahida Berberovic is the inaugural winner of the WestWords Fiction Prize for this, her debut novel Where the Soil Remembers.