Herkunft

Herkunft (published in English as Where You Come From) is Saša Stanišić's autobiographical novel about origin, memory and belonging, and the winner of the 2019 German Book Prize. An unnamed first-person narrator, closely modeled on the author, moves between the present and his childhood: fleeing the Bosnian War with his mother at fourteen, joining his father in Heidelberg, and slowly building a life in Germany while his grandmother Kristina, back in Bosnia, loses her memory to dementia.

Rather than tell that story in order, the novel fragments it — jumping between decades and countries, mixing essay, family fable and Bosnian-inflected German, and visiting the narrator's ancestral village of Oskoruša along the way. Critics have praised its balance of humor and grief, describing a book that is "neither romantic nor bitter" about displacement, and that treats language itself, and what gets lost in translating a life, as one of its subjects.

It closes with an unexpected formal turn: a pen-and-paper, choose-your-own-adventure section in which the reader decides how the narrator's story — and his village's — might end, underlining the novel's central claim that origin is something told and retold rather than simply given.