Between Mountains

A spellbinding, profound novel from one of Canada’s most accomplished poets, Between Mountains sets a heart-rending love story amidst the aftermath of the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

Daniel, a Canadian journalist, has been living in Bosnia for ten years, long after most correspondents have moved on to other global “hotspots.” On a visit to Paris he meets Lili, a Serbian-Albanian interpreter at The Hague, entrusted with hearing and telling the stories of victims and perpetrators of brutality. Their lives intersect at the trial of a man accused of war crimes, interviews with whom have formed the bedrock of Daniel’s career.

Peripatetic, driven people, Lili and Daniel are also both damaged by the horrific things they have witnessed. Each hopes to find in the other some kind of understanding, and in impossible circumstances they are drawn into an affair which could destroy everything they have worked for.

Reminiscent of The Quiet American and Fugitive Pieces, Between Mountains is at once a complex love story and a gripping novel of war and politics. Exquisitely written and vividly imagined, it explores issues of the greatest human importance within an intensely intimate landscape.

He paused in the doorway of the hotel, automatically charting the safest route. There was a little bar across the street that would probably make him an omelette in mid-afternoon, and he found himself calculating that there was not much exposed ground to cross, then forcing himself to remember that this was Paris, that there were no snipers in the neighbouring buildings, not for now at any rate. — from Between Mountains