Where You Come From

A story of family, immigration and belonging from the international bestseller and German Book Prize winner.

You find yourself in the strange, dimly lit cave of time. One passageway curves downward, the other leads upward. It occurs to you that the one leading down may go to the past and the one leading up may go to the future. Which one do you decide to take?

Sasa Stanisic’s Where You Come From is a novel about a village where only thirteen people remain, a country that no longer exists, a shattered family that is his own. Blending autofiction, fable, and choose-your-own-adventure, Stanisic explores a family’s escape during the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the years that followed as they built a life in Germany. He examines what it means to learn a new language, to find new friends and new jobs, to build an identity between countries and cultures.

Translated by Damion Searls, Where You Come From is about homelands, both remembered and imagined. A book that bends form and genre with wit, heart, and exceptional craftsmanship to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about luck and death, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.