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While it is a novel, and hence fiction, there really was a cellist in that Balkan city, whose actions made us all hold our breath in June of 1992. During that month Vedran Smailović played his cello for 22 days at the Sarajevo site where 22 people had been killed by mortar shells while queuing for bread.

This unusual act of despairing bravery by the cellist caught the imagination of people around the world. Cellist YoYo Ma recorded a work by composer David Wilde, 'The Cellist of Sarajevo' , in Smailović's honor. The progressive rock group Savatage, in an album released in 1995, Dead Winter Dead, included the song 'Christmas Eve/Sarajevo 12/24', which is said to have been inspired by Smailović, though by then he had been turned into a mythical old man. Early in this new century Grammy award winning folk singer John McCutcheon also penned a song about Smailović, 'In the Streets of Sarajevo.' And now Canadian novelist Galloway has created this eerily realistic, shinging novel in The Cellist of Sarajevo. In it the cellist is an anchor, but is not one of the protagonists.

For those who can recall the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the country's descent into an abyss of sectarian and ethnic killings in the 1990s seemed like a bad dream. It is still hard to believe that Sarajevo, a cosmopolitan center amidst beautiful mountains, remains in our minds not for these scenic features, nor the Olympics, but instead for the longest siege in modern warfare.

The siege began on April 5, 1992 and officially ended on February 29, 1996. Serb forces of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska and Yugoslav People's Army (later transformed to the Army of Serbia and Montenegro) initiated this siege against Bosnia.

It took place between poorly equipped defending forces of the Bosnian government, which had declared independence from Yugoslavia, and the Yugoslav People's Army (JNA) and Bosnian Serb forces (Army of Republika Srpska) (VRS) who had dug themselves into the hills around Sarajevo. By laying siege they aimed to destroy the newly-independent state of Bosnia and Herzegovina and replace it with the Serbian state of Republika Srpska (RS). Ironically, in June 2006 the two remaining Yugoslav republics, Montenegro and Serbia, also declared independence from each other. This ended the existence of Yugoslavia, once held together by Marshall Tito, who had ruled the federation after WWII until his death in 1980 as a neutral, non-aligned communist state.

Galloway's Cellist of Sarajevo may be fiction, yet it portrays the fear, despair, anxiety, and futility which engulfed the citizens of Sarajevo during this siege so convincingly that it makes us feel the truth: war is hell on earth. Most are fought because of either a too short or a too long memory. While there have been righteous wars, most arise from past grievances that are seen as more important than a stable present. In the case of the centuries-old the Balkan wars, it is the long memory that holds prisoner whole groups of people, all convinced that events from hundreds of years ago must still be avenged.

The victims in these wars are not the fighters, but the civilians. As war arrived in Sarajevo, it destroyed not only lives but also centuries-old cultural icons because one of the ethnic groups that shares this region felt its ancient cause was more worthy than any other.

Galloway's story compresses many of the events of the 1990s' war into weeks, but by doing so brings alive not only the physical but also the emotional toll the siege had on its citizens. Therein lies its beauty. He gives the reader a visceral sense of what happens when the thin veneer of civilization is stripped away by hate. He lets us experience what it is like when humans loose their humanity.

I cannot help but praise this writer for his ability to do so without creating a doomsday scenario. The other important aspect of this novel is that Galloway uses no religious or ethnic identifiers. The people under siege are simply Sarajavians, and the enemy snipers are merely nameless hill-side shooters whose violence bewilders the besieged.

The novel has three protagonists: Kenan, who has to overcome his fear of the need to walk weekly across the city to obtain fresh water for his family and a grumpy neighbor; Dragan, who must cross targeted bridges and intersections to go to work or obtain food, while emotionally shutting himself away from all those he once knew; and there is Arrow, a female sniper who, unknown to the cellist, has been ordered to protect him while he takes up his daily post to play Tomas Albinoni's Adagio for those 22 days. One guesses that he does this to assuage his own inner turmoil for having witnessed the mortar shells hitting the breadline.

None of the three protagonists know each other, but they are held together by the cellist, whose playing touches them in various ways; emotionally and abstractly, the music implies that there is hope in all of this despair and destruction. At the same time the reader clings to the hope, admittedly naively, that the universal language of music will win out.

The novel has other, minor players who serve mostly as the antagonists. Foremost are the black marketeers, who inevitably arise wherever demand exceeds supply. There are also two army commanders, one who wants to maintain some civility while defending his city—for which he pays a high price—the other, who reveals that even among the besieged, sides will be taken between the "us and them". For Arrow, a student, whose abilities on the university's sharp-shooting team brought her into the conflict, this has sinister implications. As attitudes disintegrate, her code of ethics by which she kills enemy snipers is imperiled.

Ultimately, each of these three individuals must come to terms with their lives within Sarajevo. The choices they will make will decide their own humanity. It is through these choices that Galloway avoids the doomsday setting without appearing maudlin. They are the choices ordinary people make under inordinate circumstances.