Summary

Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo employs a third person narrator who follows the lives of four characters living in the city of Sarajevo. The narration for the cellist, Arrow, Kenan, and Dragan uses the present tense, making the Siege of Sarajevo seem immediate and real to readers. The Siege of Sarajevo was a real historical event that lasted from April of 1992 to February of 1996. It was the longest city siege in the history of modern warfare.

The novel begins with the perspective of the unnamed cellist, who was the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Symphony Orchestra before the war. witnessing the bombing of a bread line in one of Sarajevo’s main marketplaces. Twenty-two people die and countless others are injured, traumatized, and heartbroken by the incident. The cellist decides to “play Albinoni’s Adagio…every day for twenty-two days...