The Cellist of Sarajevo is a novel published in 2008 by Canadian author Stephen Galloway. It takes place against a backdrop of war in Sarajevo during the years of the Bosnian War.
The novel is not an historical report of the Siege of Sarajevo but the book was inspired by an actual event: a group of people were waiting to buy bread and were hit by a mortar shell, with twenty-two of them killed. In the aftermath of this tragedy, renowned cellist Vedran Smailovic played the haunting Adagio in G Minor by Albinoni at the bomb site for twenty-two straight days in honor of the dead. Galloway only loosely fleshed out Smailovic as a character, but his actions inspired the novel.
The Cellist of Sarajevo received positive reviews from literary circles as well as mainstream press. Yann Martel called it “a grand and powerful novel about how people retain or reclaim their humanity when they are under extreme duress,” and Khalad Hosseini wrote, “Though the setting is the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s, this gripping novel transcends time and place. It is a universal story, and a testimony to the struggle to find meaning, grace, and humanity, even amid the most unimaginable horrors.”
It was a bestseller and was nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, and won the 2009 Evergreen Award and the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature.
