The World and All That It Holds

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“[The World and All That It Holds] is Aleksandar Hemon’s masterpiece.” ―David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

From literary powerhouse Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Lazarus Project, comes a big, brilliant, sweeping novel of love, memory, and history-in-the-making.

As the Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo on a sunny 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 sophisticated, libertine Vienna—but it’s nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can’t help.

And then the world explodes. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions and affection of Osman, a fellow soldier, a man of action to complement Pinto’s introspective, poetic soul; a dapper, charismatic storyteller; Pinto’s protector and his lover.

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

The World and All That It Holds—in all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, whimsical, philosophical glory—showcases Hemon’s celebrated talent at its pinnacle and cements him as one of the boldest voices of our time.One of
Lit Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2023”
Esquire’s “Best Books of 2023”

Praise for The World and All That It Holds:

“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, actor

“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

“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.”
―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.”
―The New York Times Book Review

“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] leaps from country to country, decade to decade, life to death and back again. . . . Powerful, beautiful. . . . Hemon pulls no punches in his most ambitious novel to date.”
―Kirkus Reviews, *starred review*

“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 ofunfettered 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

“Reading Aleksandar Hemon’s work, one is always struck by the capacity of his intellect, and the lightness and dexterity with which complex and momentous themes are handled. [In The World and All That It Holds] his prose is sure to delight in ever-inventive ways.”
—Esquire (UK)

“[An] engrossing epic. . . . This magnificent globe‑trotting, century-spanning novel mingles fact with the fabulous. . . . By turns lyrical and sardonic, it is as emotionally compelling as it is clever. I’ll be surprised if I enjoy a novel more this year.”
—The Guardian

“In the weeks since I finished Aleksandar Hemon’s unlike-any-novel-I’ve-read-before The World and All That It Holds, I have puzzled over how vividly it remains with me—I keep reentering this world, its sensory intensity more palpable than many memories of my own life. The novel’s ability to perpetuate itself seems to me to come both from the fantastic virtuosity of the writing and from the wonderfully realized idea of the book, which is to have the reader live the war-torn life.”
—The Boston Globe

“Hemon vividly conveys the unrelenting hardship, despair and monotony of the refugee’s life, of what it means to live without papers and retain a shred of dignity. . . . [A] majestic, ambitious masterpiece . . . [and] an epic tale.”
—Financial Times

“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.”
―Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Fresh and contemporary. . . . Aleksandar Hemon’s continent-spanning new novel is a sprawling tale of war and migration that doesn’t lose sight of the intimately human story at its heart.”
—The List (UK)

“[The World and All That it Holds is] replete with linguistic beauty and lyrical depth.”
—World Music CentralALEKSANDAR 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 a New York Times bestseller, along with 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, and the novel The Making of Zombie Wars. He has also written two volumes of essays, The Book of My Lives and My Parents/This Does Not Belong to You. Among other accolades, he has received a “genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award for a Writer in Mid-Career, and the 2020 John Dos Passos Prize. He cowrote the script for The Matrix Resurrections and produces music as Cielo Hemon. He teaches at Princeton University.US

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