April Fool's Day - by Josip Novakovich (Paperback)

From the Back Cover

Ivan Dolinar is born in Tito's Yugoslavia on April Fool's Day, 1948 -- the auspicious beginning of a life that will be derailed by backfiring good intentions in a world of propaganda and paranoia. At age nineteen, an innocent prank cuts the young Croatian's budding medical career short and lands him in a notorious labor camp. Released on the eve of civil war, Ivan is drafted into the wrong army, becoming a pawn in an absurd conflict in which the rules and loyalties shift abruptly and without warning. But even in a world gone mad, one course of action remains eminently sane: survival.

Told with bitingly dark humor and a deep tenderness, April Fool's Day is both a devastating political satire and a razor-sharp parody of war.

Review Quotes

"An ambitious first novel ... The magic realism of the final sections is exemplary; Novakovich has found his groove." -- Washington Post

"[Ivan] is a fully rounded character, the type of protagonist...that we rarely find in fiction." -- Chicago Tribune

"Delightfully neurotic . . . Novakovich brings a deft touch to his ambitious and unconventional first novel." -- Columbus Dispatch

"APRIL FOOL'S DAY is a wonder...[It] has an economy of style and narrative that all good readers will relish." -- Republic of Letters

"A heartfelt novel about the war-torn Balkans that's actually quite funny...and touching." -- GQ

"Both humorous and horrifying as it traces one man's misadventures." -- USA Today

"Wickedly funny and deeply harrowing...Novakovich knows how to tell a story...Strange, lyrical beauty abounds here." -- Maud Casey, New York Times Book Review

"Disturbing and frequently beautiful...the novel is a Balkan conflation of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Gogol's DEAD SOULS, and SLAUGHERHOUSE FIVE." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

"There are very few native-born English speakers who write as well. -- Tibor Fischer, The Guardian

"[A] laugh-while-you-grimace novel...[Novakovich] writes with dark wit, and a touching sympathy." -- Newsweek International

"Rife with dark humor [and] notable for its witty reflections on politics, literature and the vicissitudes of the human heart." -- San Diego Union-Tribune

"An agreeably eccentric first novel from one of the more interesting and unusual contemporary writers." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred