"'Like Nabokov, Hemon writes with the startling peeled vision of the outsider, weighing words as if for the first time; he shares with Kundera an ability to find grace and humour in the bleakest of circumstances' Observer"

'The hard part in writing a narrative of someone's life is choosing from the abundance of details and microevents, all of them equally significant, or equally insignificant,' writes Alekshandar Hemon in this sequel to The Question of Bruno. Nowhere Man (named for the boys' favourite Beatles song, representing their lack of prospects in Bosnia) continues the story of Jozef Pronek, a Sarajevo native who, on a visit to Chicago, was stranded in the United States when the Balkan war broke out, unable to return home. Pronek's story is told in a simple yet eloquent language, infusing the mundane with ominous significance. Hemon has been writing in English since 1995, and brings an expatriate's eye to the story he tells, filling every line with the numbing anomie of living somewhere alien. His life is filtered through a fumbling lens, told by narrators more obsessed with minute detail and associative anecdotes rather than a sequential narrative. Jozef himself never speaks, and the story is never told from his point of view, but is full of the experiences of being adrift in a culture, uncomprehending and isolating; learning a new language, and navigating a new city. And although the pacing sometimes drags, the little details are worth it. Nowhere Man is proof that Alekshandar Hemon is an exciting new voice in literature. (Kirkus UK)

Aleksandar Hemon (born 1964) is a Bosnian-Herzegovinian fiction writer and journalist.

Born in Sarajevo, Aleksandar Hemon visited Chicago in 1992, intending to stay for a matter of months. While he was there, Sarajevo came under siege, and he was unable to return home. Hemon wrote his first story in English in 1995. His work now appears regularly in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hemon was awarded a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. Riverhead will publish Hemon’s next book, Love and Obstacles, in 2009.