Between Mountains

By Maggie Helwig

Book Overview

Maggie Helwig's stunning British debut is an extraordinary war novel, a poignant and gripping story about the ripples that carry on long after the fighting is over, and about two people kept apart by... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0676976298
• ISBN13: 9780676976298
• Release Date: March 2005
• Publisher: Vintage Books Canada
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

the endless effects of war

"Between Mountains" is a harsh and beautiful book; it is sobering, but not, in the end, depressing. The story centers on Daniel, a war correspondent, and Lili, a translator, who are brought together and then kept apart by their roles on the fringe of the Balkan conflict. The strictest integrity and impartiality are demanded by Lili's career as a translator for high-level international negotiations; any sort of friendship with a journalist is out of the question. Yet she and Daniel become closer and closer to each other as they also get closer to a true conflict of interest: Lili will be translating at the war crimes trial of Nikola Markovic, whom Daniel has interviewed extensively. Events spiral out of control, the past reaches out to blight the future, and through Markovic's own unwilling recollections, the reader is drawn into an understanding of the terrible weight of war.Okay, that sounds depressing. And on some level, it is. At the core of the book is this awful paradox: that war and hatred feel like they have their own agency, they feel like inescapable forces that no one creates and no one person could possibly sway -- and yet in the end they are composed of *nothing* but the choices of individuals. The book provokes a lot of thought about what can and can't be accomplished by individuals in that context; given the world we live in, those thoughts aren't especially rosy, but they're not hopeless either. The book holds out some hope for its characters, and for our prospects of finding ways to live without war.