It is the end of the day and Irena Zaric wonders where to put her last bullet before she goes home. Irena is a sniper, a teenage girl caught in the middle of the Bosnian war. She is part fact, part fiction, created largely from the imagination and memories of NPR’s Scott Simon in his new novel “Pretty Birds.”
In the early 1990s, Scott spent a lot of time reporting from Sarajevo, covering the struggles of the people to survive, during the long and deadly siege of the city. “Pretty Birds” takes him a step beyond his work as a journalist.
After all the news reports and death tolls, and long after the world’s attention has moved on to the next hot spot, he says that fiction can be a way to both rekindle and give some permanence to the emotion and tragedy of a war zone.
Guests:
Scott Simon, author of “Pretty Birds,” and host of NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday