This book explores the minutiae of life under occupation, making the reader feel the fears, frustrations and brutalities. It confronts you with war's atrocities and is brave enough to withhold narrative judgment to allow you to make up your own mind. Uncomfortable and at times harrowing, yet ultimately an important novel about the forgotten voices in war that deserve to be heard.
... I glimpsed two soldiers. And by now I've learned my lesson, that I must remain calm and composed in situations like this, and so I waved at them, saying in a clear, confident voice that I worked in the building they were standing in front of. At that, one of them bent his right knee to the ground and propped his left elbow on his knee, aiming the barrel of his gun at me .... And while his action, by which I mean him pointing his gun at me, cannot be described as humane, it was enough for me to understand what he meant, and that I had to find another way to my new job.
