The Delivery Room

Sylvia Brownrigg

Mira is not an immediately attractive character. She seems too self contained and unavailable. However, I was interested in the way the author mirrors her private struggles with the horrors of war and bereavement in Bosnia. Not an easy read but worth the effort.

Extract

It was strange to be hated. Mira had acquired the art of it only gradually. I am not that, she wanted to say about Milosovic, and even more fervently we are not them, the shellers, the rapists, the drivers from homes ....

But Serbians generally, the people she loved and knew - her people, her family, the nation that was hers, even if she had left it? It was not that. She wanted to say, We are a proud, good people.

Parallels