Unspeakable Home - by Ismet Prcic

Book Synopsis

From award-winning writer Ismet Prcic, a "brutal and tender and beautiful" (Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars) novel that is "part existential cry...part anguished confession...a transfiguring of personal memory to obscure the terrible cost of exile" (The New York Times).

Having fled his war-torn hometown of Tuzla as a teenager, our narrator, Izzy, found love and a measure of stability in California with his beloved. But his American marriage couldn't survive his Bosnian brokenness, the trauma so entrenched and insidious that it became impossible to communicate to anyone outside of himself--even the person he loved most. Now, as he writes in the first of many courageously candid fan letters to the comedian Bill Burr, he knows he must try.

"An adventurous novel that meshes a fragmented narrative with a broken soul" (Kirkus Reviews), Unspeakable Home takes us through Izzy's memories and confessions as he reflects on his bomb-ravaged childhood, the implosion of his relationships, and an agonizing battle with alcoholism. As multiple narrators surface in fragments with increasingly tenuous connections to reality, Prcic unearths the psychological cost of exile and shame with a roving, kinetic energy and a sharp, searching sense of humor.

What emerges is a vivid and poignant exploration of the stories we create to hide the deepest parts of our identity from ourselves, as well as a hard-won, life-affirming promise of redemption.

Review Quotes

"Part existential cry, part urinal graffito, part anguished confession, Unspeakable Home is a survival strategy, a transfiguring of personal memory to obscure the terrible cost of exile." --The New York Times Book Review

"At once sobering and intoxicating, hilarious and sad, brutal and tender and beautiful." --Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars

"An adventurous novel that meshes a fragmented narrative with a broken soul. . . Tricky, prismatic, sardonic. . . Prcic has an excellent command of the everyday anxieties of the maintenance alcoholic--the deceptions of loved ones, the small preparations. And Prcic can be funny, with a hyperactive comic tone that cuts to the heart of his struggle." --Kirkus Reviews

"[A] clever and moving work of autofiction. . . Prcic adeptly portrays his characters' shaky lives and painful pasts, and the blend of autobiography and metafiction evokes Izzy's disorientation. Prcic's impressive talents are on full display." --Publishers Weekly

"Turning himself--and the novel--inside out, Prcic astonishes with this brilliant and unruly cri du coeur." --Antoine Wilson, author of Mouth to Mouth

"Through an ambitious structure reflecting his own war-torn psyche, Prcic expertly mines his pain like a reporter inside his own wounds, sending out dispatches of reckless intimacy and dazzling humor, the wild and particular pyrotechnics of his grief-deranged heartwreck on glorious display. I found not only solace and camaraderie in his longing for homes lost, but the inspiration to continue on in the face of profound sorrow. It's a berserker, bravura performance of a busted and booze-soaked heart sorting through its own broken pieces to survive, of a man battling back from the brink(s) with humor, swagger, and just enough crazy to keep going. In short--an absolute triumph." --Matt Sumell, author of Making Nice

"Ismet Prcic writes as if every window in the house is open to the wind, years of pages blowing about, and there's only time to grab from the air the scenes that really matter, the ones written with such candor and boldness of mind that they can't get lost. They are too necessary. Unspeakable Home is a profound novel of extraordinary emotional honesty." --Idra Novey, author of Take What You Need

"Unspeakable Home is fierce and unforgettable, forged in the heart. It is a darkly funny, surprising, and sad accounting of the Bosnia that broke the refugee-narrator, and of the phantom actor he became on the California set. Home, love, self--Prcic, the drinker, puts a match to it all in scorching scenes that sear the eyes. And still, there is promise of return." --Christine Schutt, author of Pure Hollywood

"Reading Unspeakable Home is humbling, unnerving, and reading it also gives audition to a voice that might otherwise be screaming alone. A novel as powerful as Last Exit to Brooklyn and as necessary, with a manifold character who refuses 'the chaos of anonymity or silence.' A brilliant and deadly serious comic novel." --Michelle Latiolais, author of Widow and She

"After a dramatic escape from war in Bosnia, a quieter violence begins: the character of Izzy finds that his heart, body and head are littered with landmines and craters, that beginning again will not be as simple as waking up in America. Unspeakable Home is an insistent and steady stitching together of manhood, selfhood, humanness. Here is light and humor and love and storytelling. Ismet Prcic delivers a heart-lifting portrait of the almost fantastical act of continuation and repair." --Ramona Ausubel, author of The Last Animal

"Unspeakable Home is a deep dive to the bottom of the ocean we call memory in an effort to recover the will to live. Ismet Prcic invents a language for travel with lyric precision, from the point of view of a refugee in exile, creating a point of view pieced together from soul shards. The war zones are literal and symbolic: Bosnia, childhood, love, the bomb laden terrain of addiction. What emerges, astonishingly, is a love song." --Lidia Yuknavich, author of Thrust

"If there is a writer who has written more powerfully, more searingly, more bravely about trauma, PTSD, and alcoholism--they have not survived the telling. Ismet Prcic shows us the inside of this cunning, baffling, and powerful disease--one that has claimed so many brilliant writers, and also made living with them nearly impossible. A book that is insane, insatiable, sometimes very funny, tragic, and ultimately beautiful. It is a book that crosses the globe, and in that crossing, delineates a wide swath of the human heart." --Pauls Toutonghi, author of Red Weather, Evel Knievel Days, and The Refugee Ocean

"Laughter and madness. Madness and laughter. Ismet Prcic's Unspeakable Home is that rarity, a book both painful and funny. It will cost you, but read it." --Lou Mathews, author of Shaky Town

About the Author

Ismet Prcic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1977 and immigrated to America in 1996. His first novel, Shards, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Chicago Sun-Times Best Book of the Year, as well as the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction.