Sarajevo

"Irena decided that she would not shoot at someone who looked like Sting, the Princess of Wales, or Katarina Witt. She wanted to be able to enjoy looking at their pictures without seeing ghosts. She would not shoot at someone who was already wounded, though she would judge if someone limped because he had truly been wounded or because he had jammed his toe kicking a plugged-up toilet."

In April of 1992, one month after the European Union declared Bosnia's independence, Serb forces descended on Sarajevo to flush out the Muslims and create a new "ethnically pure" Serb state. This ethnic cleansing, systematic rape, and genocide would result in over 10,000 deaths and the displacement of more than 2.2 million people by December of 1995.

This fighting is the backdrop of Pretty Birds, the first novel from National Public Radio's award-winning journalist Scott Simon. The story chronicles the experiences of Irena Zaric, a Muslim star high school basketball player who loves Johnny Depp, Madonna, and her pet parrot, Pretty Bird. When asked about her tendency toward violence, Irena replies, "I'm kind of a pacifist." But when invading Serbs, led by a man called "the Knight" whose voice Irena hears at night over a loudspeaker in the nearby hills, begin to shred the pieces of Irena's life, she can no longer stand by and do nothing. To pay for food for her family she finds a job sweeping floors, but must adjust to life when her broom is replaced with a sniper rifle and she becomes a pawn of war, biding her time in abandoned buildings waiting for targets.

"Before Sarajevo," says Simon of his research, "I thought journalists were intrepid, brave, resourceful people and the universe was a decent place. It took me a long time to come to terms with what I saw there." Indeed, the same could be said for the city itself. It has now been nearly 17 years since the last sniper shot rang out in war-ravaged Sarajevo, and the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina is still realigning the pieces of itself. The city's resilience is seen in many ways, not the least of which is its push to recreate its culture through art. The National Theater has produced over 1,000 plays and more than 250 operas since its establishment in 1921. The Sarajevo Film Festival is the phoenix of the city, rising in 1995 from the smoldering wreckage of war.

Dedication to the arts is not the only reason why Sarajevo landed itself on Lonely Planet's list of top ten cities to visit in 2010. Coffee houses, artisans' shops, mosques, cathedrals, bazaars, bridges, and a long-running tram system are testaments to the ability of a people to revive the soul of a culture buried for three years in the artillery of religious hatred. Flanked by cobblestone streets on either side, the Miljacka River is the pulse of Sarajevo, a force that saw citizens through the most devastating European armed conflict since World War II and thus became a verity to which Sarajevans could set their lives.

If Simon's novel is the story of a peace-loving girl thrust into the smoke of battle, the promise of today's Sarajevo was no doubt the force that impelled her to pull the trigger.