Someone has opened the doors to the Village Archive, but what drives the sleepless out of their houses is not that which was stolen, but that which has escaped. Old stories, myths, and fairy tales are wandering about the streets with the people. They come together in a novel about a long night, a mosaic of village life, in which the long-established and newcomers, the dead and the living, craftsmen, pensioners, and noble robbers in football shirts bump into each other. They all want to bring something to a close, in this night before the feast. Booksellers love BEFORE THE FEAST! “Before the Feast is a big book in every sense: it's vibrant, compassionate, and knowing. Stanišić channels an almost reckless energy into a novel that's at once sprawling and controlled.” — Stephen Sparks, Green Apple Books on the Park “Stanišic’s work is seamless, rhythmic, and captivating. Anthea Bell makes for a dream translator, perfectly capturing his whimsy and idiosyncrasies. This is not a book to consume once and leave on the shelf to collect dust. Like your favorite fairy tales, Before the Feast is a story to experience again and again, whose charms will enchant you every time it is read.” — Rachel Kaplan, Avid Bookshop "A dead ferryman; a solitary oak in a fallow field; a night that illuminates a troubled past like a bolt of lightning splitting the dark. Furstenfeld is an isolated-one may even say xenophobic town bordering a lake in eastern Germany-the former GDR. However, those ancient, timeless fairy tales swirl about the present more than that recent history. Sasa Stanisic has written a stunning modern fable in that grand tradition. The reader is immediately unsettled as if trying to peer through the mistbefore dawn. You try to stitch the various images into a coherent whole, never quite certain if the "reality" you perceive actually exists. Stanisic, a genuine heir to the Grimm tradition, gives no quarter, and the reader is all the more grateful for it. He does this all while writing such beautiful prose, sentences that can take your breath away." — Shawn Wathen Chapter One Bookstore "Every single thing in this book is alive. Everything speaks, and some of it you can hear. It’s like someone with a gorgeous voice stops you. He’s talking fast, very fast — talking and talking and he won’t shut up. There you are, you can’t help listening, but then, worst of all, his story becomes so strange and heartfelt that you can’t STOP listening. You’re all caught up and you can’t stop listening and then when he’s done (it’s been a while but anyway it’s too soon), he goes away, but you — you still hear the gorgeous voice talking in your head, like it’s coming from everything, everywhere, maybe for days on end. You want to never stop hearing it." — Pepper from Vintage Books

For young Aleksandar — the best magician in the non-aligned states and painter of unfinished things — life is endowed with a mythic quality in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, a rich playground for his imagination. When his grandfather dies, Aleks channels his storytelling talent to help with his grief. It is a gift he calls on again when the shadow of war spreads to Višegrad, and the world as he knows it stops. Though Aleks and his family flee to Germany, he is haunted by his past — and by Asija, the mysterious girl he tried to save. Desperate to learn of her fate, Aleks returns to his hometown on the anniversary of his grandfather's death to discover what became of her and the life he left behind