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The World and All That It Holds: A Novel Hardcover – January 24, 2023

4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 375 ratings

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The World and All That It Holds―in all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical glory―showcases Aleksandar Hemon’s celebrated talent at its pinnacle. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction.

As Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It’s not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can’t put in perspective.

And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul; a charismatic storyteller; Pinto’s protector and lover.

Together, Pinto and Osman will escape the trenches, survive near-certain death, tangle with spies and Bolsheviks. Over mountains and across deserts, from one world to another, all the way to Shanghai, it is Pinto’s love for Osman―with the occasional opiatic interlude―that keeps him going.


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From the Publisher

The World and All That It Holds Aleksandar Hemon

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The World and All That It Holds Aleksandar Hemon Douglas Stuart quote

The World and All That It Holds Aleksandar Hemon Gary Shteyngart quote

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Editorial Reviews

Review

The World and All That It Holds would be an audacious title for a book by anybody except God–or Aleksandar Hemon. . . the irrepressible voice of The World and All That It Holds glides along a cushion of poignancy buoyed by wry humor. From start to finish, no matter what else he’s up to, Hemon is telling a tale about the resilience of true love.”
―RON CHARLES, The Washington Post

“Love is not the engine of history, but it certainly makes for an indispensable source of auxiliary power in the historical novel… In this novel idyll and ordeal are not stable categories, but slide past each other.”
―ADAM MARS-JONES, The New York Times Book Review

“Hemon’s writing is both gripping and lucid. He creates this work around such meticulous texture that the reader can stand alongside Pinto, and feel the cities as if they were with him…
The World And All That It Holds is a book that will resonate with readers because it shows how a life with purpose is one that is constant motion."
―EDWARD BANCHS, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Aleksandar Hemon’s
The World and All That It Holds is one of the finest novels I’ve ever read, and like all great stories, it refuses to be pigeonholed. It’s a road novel, an immigrant tale, a ghost story, a family portrait, a mystery, a historical epic, a war novel, and yes, a love story―it is all that and more, a feat of
unfettered literary bravura. In short, a masterpiece.”
―RABIH ALAMEDDINE, author of The Wrong End of the Telescope

"Hemonites rejoice! The master is back and he has forged a remarkable tale of love and war alongside his own 20th Century Silk Road. From Sarajevo to Shanghai, every sentence, every paragraph is a sensuous and often hilarious delight. Not a Hemonite yet? I envy you your very first encounter with one of the world's greatest writers."

―GARY SHTEYNGART, author of
Our Country Friends

"
The World and All That It Holds is a twisting, turning epic rooted in love in all its forms; an odyssey of statelessness; a haunted museum of history ranging from Sarajevo to Shanghai and Jerusalem; and an apothecary of wit, folklore and unexpectable sentences. This life-stuffed novel is Aleksandar Hemon’s masterpiece.”
―DAVID MITCHELL, author of Cloud Atlas

"
The World and All that It Holds is an explosive novel. Bursting with energy, wits, and insights, it’s an epic meditation on history, philosophy, and human conditions. Aleksandar Hemon once again proves him to be one of our most innovative and invigorating novelists."
―YIYUN LI, author of The Book of Goose

“This book is a refuge. Amid the catastrophe and unimaginable loss, you can still find heartbreaking kindness; you can still hear songs and laughter; still know the tender brush of a lover’s whiskered cheek. Every page folds itself around you, as comforting as an embrace, and in those pages, you will feel Aleksandar Hemon’s heart beating beside yours.”
―LANA WACHOWSKI, filmmaker

The World And All That It Holds is a masterwork of the epic and the intimate. I lost myself to this tale of Sarajevans drawn into the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and their fight to survive in the war that followed. It is a staggering work of beauty and brutality, a testament to love, family, and the ties that call us home.”
―DOUGLAS STUART, author of Shuggie Bain

"An astoundingly expansive new novel form one of my all-time favorite writers.
The World and All That It Holds is at once a heartbreaking love story and a thrilling history of twentieth-century Eurasia. It's an amazing accomplishment of epic history and personal drama."
―JESSE EISENBERG

About the Author

Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, which was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and three books of short stories: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. He was the recipient of a 2003 Guggenheim Fellowship and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, and the 2020 Dos Passos Prize. He lives in Chicago.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ MCD (January 24, 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0374287708
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0374287702
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.01 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1.15 x 8.55 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars 375 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.2 out of 5 stars
375 global ratings

Customers say

Customers find the book brilliant, intense, and thrilling. They also describe the plot as tender and crushing. However, some find the readability difficult with frequent excursions into Ladino.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

6 customers mention "Difficulty level"6 positive0 negative

Customers find the book brilliant, compelling, and worth every effort. They also say it's a superb work on the world.

"Aleksandar Hemon's immersive new novel is brilliant and breathtaking, intense and thrilling and probably one of the greatest books to start 2023...." Read more

"...But the book is so engrossing, so compelling it never occurred to me to stop reading...." Read more

"...with its frequent excursions into Spaniel (Ladino), but it is well worth the effort." Read more

"The book is perfect and I am happily surprised to have received it so quickly. Thank you!" Read more

3 customers mention "Plot"3 positive0 negative

Customers find the plot brilliant, breathtaking, sweet, tender, and confusing.

"Aleksandar Hemon's immersive new novel is brilliant and breathtaking, intense and thrilling and probably one of the greatest books to start 2023...." Read more

"...The genuine love displayed in the novel is so tender and crushing...." Read more

"...A truly great book. Sad and lonely and confusing and sweet and loving." Read more

5 customers mention "Readability"0 positive5 negative

Customers find the book difficult and slow to read at times. They also mention that the frequent excursions into Spanish make the book very difficult to understand.

"...The reading is demanding, mainly because the writer insists on avoiding any translation of some texts and brief dialogues in different languages...." Read more

"...Hemon's writing but his use of untranslated phrases makes this a very difficult and slow read at times. What am I missing? Is this essential?..." Read more

"...It is not an easy book to read, with its frequent excursions into Spaniel (Ladino), but it is well worth the effort." Read more

"I see I am not alone thinking this book is difficult to read, peppered as it is with words from a language that is going to be foreign to most...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2023
Aleksandar Hemon's immersive new novel is brilliant and breathtaking, intense and thrilling and probably one of the greatest books to start 2023. The reading is demanding, mainly because the writer insists on avoiding any translation of some texts and brief dialogues in different languages. However, once the reader gets the ideas and understands the context of the lack of such translations - it makes the reading of the book all the more enjoyable and bewildering. Without spoiling anything - readers of the book must constantly bear in mind that language is a topic in this book. People speak in different languages. Sometimes they understand each other and sometimes they don't, and the reader is no exception. This is a compelling and heartbreaking love story. It is a book about bloody wars and peoples seeking refuge. It's about religion and corruption and Islam and Christianity and Judaism and writing and art and it is a superb work on the world and all that it holds. Worth every effort.
12 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 5, 2023
Like others who have posted, I am in awe of the brilliance of Hemon's writing but his use of untranslated phrases makes this a very difficult and slow read at times. What am I missing? Is this essential? Can I skip it and hope I get the meaning from the context? Or must I drop everything and immediately go to Google Translate? Assuming Hemon is writing in a language Google can identify and translate!

I'm somewhat multilingual, but it's not always clear what the languages are and I am SURE that Google doesn't do Spanjol! (Some of the phrases in Spanjol I understand but others are very obscure. Spanjol is a form of Judeo-Spanish spoken in the Balkans that developed in Ottoman times. It's basically medieval Spanish with many loan words from Hebrew, Turkish, and southern Slavic languages.) Just trying to guess which southern Slavic language Hemon favors is a puzzle. Is it Serbian? Croatian? Bosnian? One of the others? Then there is Turkish, not one of the languages most English-speakers are familiar with. Assuming it IS Turkish. Could it be a word from one of the other Turkic languages that dominate Central Asia? Is it Uzbek? HELP!!!

Please, Alex, in your next work continue to dazzle us with your linguistic range, but give us lesser mortals some hints and clues, or just translate what you're saying directly, so we can savor the flavor of the original thought but still get the jist of what you're trying to tell us!
18 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2023
This is a gorgeous, devastating, confounding, brilliant book. Many reviewers here and elsewhere make note of the author's penchant for scattering various untranslated passages, songs and poems throughout the novel. Like many, at first I found this puzzling and frustrating: at one point I asked Google to translate a passage only to be told that Croatian wasn't one of the languages translated by Google Translate! But the book is so engrossing, so compelling it never occurred to me to stop reading. And then I realized that my confusion--exasperation at times---put me, in a minor but crucial way, in the same position Hemon's characters find themselves in: refugees with no guide, no translator, no compass. And so, like them, I kept going. I hope other readers will too.
16 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2023
My first book by this author, I picked a good one. A GREAT one. A page-turner really even through the gruesome war scenes. The genuine love displayed in the novel is so tender and crushing. I've not finished the last ten or so pages because I don't want to know how it ends. I don't want it to end.
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2023
Story line is good but difficult to track where the characters are. So far don't have a big picture of the war.
3 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on July 31, 2023
The World and All That it Holds by Aleksandar Hemon is an extraordinary work of historical fiction that begins on the cusp of World War One and follows one man and his “family” through the end of World War Two and beyond, from Europe to China and myriad other countries and continents. Among many honors Mr. Heron has received, his previous novel and one of his short story collections were finalists for the 2008 National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. I am grateful to Mr. Heron, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD, and NetGalley for providing me an advanced digital copy of this book for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Most of the book is so brilliantly written as to be mesmerizing, and it swept me along, page after page, eager to read more. HOWEVER, and this is a HUGE CAVEAT and DRAWBACK, the book contains numerous, frustrating, distracting words and entire lines and phrases of text in varying foreign languages that interrupt the story’s flow so as to have made me want to stop reading at the beginning of the book and made it tiresome at times. I tried looking up some of the words, but even that was difficult; a glossary by the author would have been helpful. Finally, I had to decide just to skip over and ignore these words and phrases so as to enjoy the whole of the book. If it weren’t for these annoying distractions, I would call this book a masterpiece.
Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2023
Stories within stories, a decades-long journey from Sarajevo to Shanghai. Pinto's is a story of joy and despair, of love and loss. He can be understood as an avatar for the Sephardim, or indeed all of those who suffered through the wars of the last century but persevered. It is not an easy book to read, with its frequent excursions into Spaniel (Ladino), but it is well worth the effort.
2 people found this helpful
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Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2023
The book is perfect and I am happily surprised to have received it so quickly. Thank you!

Top reviews from other countries

Silvery surfer
5.0 out of 5 stars Expansive novel.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 3, 2023
Thoroughly enjoyed this book.Took me to places I've rarely read about and never visited. The use of Hebrew and Croat takes a bit of getting used to but is often amusing. A great story of love and war.
DOUGLAS L GOLD
1.0 out of 5 stars DREK
Reviewed in Canada on April 19, 2023
Just awful.
Liljana Savic
4.0 out of 5 stars interesting book
Reviewed in Germany on July 12, 2023
I like Hemon’s writing although at times I wonder what exactly is he trying to say. Still think it’s worth reading.
J M Curtis
5.0 out of 5 stars Rewarding
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 16, 2023
This is not an easy book, but stick with. It’s worth it.
Mel
3.0 out of 5 stars Over hyped
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 22, 2024
I am struggling to understand the 5 star reviews for this one. The story was ok but the writing style was difficult, disjointed and often at times boring to read. I couldn’t wait to finish it for most of the book.