In the hold

It is the autumn of 1991, the beginning of war in the former Yugoslavia. As a mass exodus empties Belgrade of those trying to evade the conflict just beyond the border, a young couple await the birth of their first child. This is the story of their family and those close to it - people desperately trying to carry on with their modern lives in a world increasingly ruled by primitive passions.

The expectant father - ironic and bemused, anxiously enervated but determined to keep peace at home - is scarcely a fair match for his fiery wife, Angela, particularly in her third trimester.

Once an enterprising black market capitalist, she has put business aside for motherhood, "to become what she had in fact always wanted to be - a housewife." But when her younger brother, a maddeningly enlightened though awkward Hare Krishna, unexpectedly answers the draft call - succumbing to the seductions of an even more incomprehensible dogma - the delicate fabric of their comforting routine begins to unravel.

Against the "Tehranesque panoramas ... of the deceived capital," everyday life soon takes the turbulent form of a soap opera - but one without the reassuring promise of conventional resolutions.

Arsenijevic's novel is a brutal story, by turns nightmarish and comical. Like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it gives us a generation caught in circumstances not of their making, but refusing nevertheless to share the visions of their country's rulers. It is also a haunting tale of family life in surreal disarray.