The Lost World

The Lost World

The Lost World

Alfred van Cleef

Twenty years after the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Alfred van Cleef traveled back to Prijedor where as recently as 2013, mass graves were still being discovered. New meetings with the Berberovic brothers show that the war has left marks on all.

Two brothers survived the camps in Keraterm and Omarska. No one had heard from the third brother for a long time when Alfred van Cleef first visited the area in 1993. Now he revisits Bosnia to discover what the impact of the war is today. How has it affected the survivors and their children?

We see the impact of the war through the eyes of the brothers and their family who were spread all over Europe as refugees. Everybody deals with the effects differently. Quiet and closed or angry and bitter. 'It is a long and bad dream,' Senad says in fluent Dutch, 'I just don't understand my life.'

The Lost World is a touching history of a Bosnian family, a universal story of the effects of war on human lives. The pain, fear, grief and inhumane choices that had to be made will move all who read the book.

‘This book, straddling the borderline between journalism and literature, should actually be translated into Serbo-Croatian. In its seeming lack of all pretension, it belongs among the best of all that has been written about the war there.’ – de Volkskrant

‘A realistic, exciting and tragic story, well-written and told without unnecessary pathos or sentimentality.’ – NRC Handelsblad

'A remarkable book.' – The New Yorker

‘What suffering does an armed conflict cause in the immediate surroundings, what happens to the family, to friends? An impressive account.’ – De Morgen