The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia

“A tragic portrait . . . presented with sympathy and frequently with humor . . . [of] a disparate people who were never united except by their resentment of a foreign conqueror.” – Atlantic Monthly

In The Impossible Country, Brian Hall relates his encounters with Serbs, Croats, and Muslims— “real people, likeable people” who are now overcome with suspicion and anxiety about one another. Hall takes the standard explanations, the pundits’ predictions, and the evening news footage and inverts our perceptions of the country, its politics, its history, and its seemingly insoluble animosities.