The Cellist of Sarajevo is Canadian novelist Steven Galloway’s third novel, but only the first to be published in the UK & Ireland. I picked up the novel enthusiastically (it’s beautifully put together, from the elegant cover through to the paging and paper-weight) but also with the slight apprehension that always accompanies a novel that uses real situations – particularly from such a troubling event in recent European history – as part of its narrative skeleton.

It’s quickly apparent that Galloway is more than up to the tricky task of balancing respect for the real history, and at the same time creating a piece of literature that stands up on its own merits. Just as Nathan Englander managed, in his excellent The Ministry of Special Cases, to create a thoroughly credible Buenos Aires despite not having lived there during the dark days of the dirty war, so too Galloway’s Sarajevo, at least to this reader, seems authentic. With Englander’s Buenos Aires, because of the nature of the drama, the setting could, in theory, have been changed without damaging the narrative particularly (in fact Englander has repeatedly referred to the novel as his ‘Jerusalem novel’). Galloway’s novel, though, hangs on the culture, geography, and history of the Bosnian capital as surely as it lends itself to the book’s title.

The story revolves loosely around a real-life event. Following the killing of twenty-two people by mortar bombs in Sarajevo’s market during the siege years, a Cellist (Vedran Smailovic) decides to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor at the site of the killing to honour the dead. That’s the starting point for Galloway’s book.

What I particularly like, thus far (i’m half way through), is the modest unfussy way that Galloway fleshes out abstract notions through his characters and their actions. Take this piece where one of the protagonists, Arrow, prepares to shoot a soldier besieging the city:

Then they both turn their heads as though called by someone Arrow can’t see and she knows the time to fire has come. Nothing has made a decision for her, so Arrow simply chooses one. If there’s a resaon, if it’s because one shot is easier, or one of them reminds her of someone she once knew and liked or didn’t like, or one of them seems more dangerous than the other, she can’t say. The only certainty is that she exhales and her finger goes from resting on the trigger to squeezing it, and a bullet breaks the sound barrier an instant before pulping fabric, skin, bone, flesh and organ, beginning a short process that will turn motion into meat.

In that short passage there’s a vivid description of a single act, that at the same time becomes a metaphor for so much more surrounding the siege.

Why this beautiful and moving book hasn’t had more attention paid to it – at least so far – is a mystery to me.