Virtual Book Tour + #Giveaway: Father of One by Jani Anttola @GoddessFish

FATHER OF ONE

Jani Anttola

GENRE: War Novel/Literary Fiction

BLURB:

Maka, a young Bosnian soldier, has survived three years under siege. When the enemy forces launch their final attack on his hometown, he must escape to the hills. But traversing the vast woods is a task against all odds: to stay alive, and to find his infant son and his wife, he is soon forced to make a desperate move.

Set against the harrowing background of raging guerrilla warfare and the genocide in Srebrenica, Father of One is, at heart, a story of deep humanity, compassion and love. It is the account of one man’s desire to reunite his family, separated by war, and of bonds unbroken by trauma, sustained by loyalty and tenacity. Writing in a voice that rings with clarity and authenticity, Jani Anttola lays open a dark moment in Europe’s recent history.

Purchase FATHER OF ONE on Amazon UK, Amazon US, and The Book Guild

Excerpt:

They walked up to the plaza where narrow streets led from the ancient town gate towards the centre of the promontory and the Saint George’s church and its cemetery gardens that overlooked the old fishing town. Most of the shops lining the plaza were shuttered. Turning up towards the rectory, they came to the café bar. A young, lean man in a dress shirt and round eyeglasses was sitting by the window with an espresso and listening to the radio that the waiter had placed on the counter. A newscast was on and a woman newsreader was talking in rapid, tense sentences about something.

“Good morning,” said the waiter. “Lovers up so early?” He was an acquaintance of the hotel owner, a smooth-mannered boy who came from the lavender country in Istria. The old man had recommended the place for their shop-roasted coffee.

“Good morning,” Maka said. Amelia dismissed the innuendo with a little laugh. “How are you?”

“I’m good as always.”

Maka, leaning to the counter and taking off his sun hat, looked at the radio. “What’s the news?”

“Their Teritorijalna Odbrana got the orders to start a counteroffensive.”

“No,” Amelia said, looking at the grave-faced waiter.

“When was that?” Maka asked.

“Last night. There’s armoured columns advancing towards Ljubljana. Six JNA brigades.”

“It’s happening too fast. They declared independence only three days ago.”

“Well, it’s happening, all right,” the waiter said. “Yesterday they shot down two helicopters. Now there’s fighting on the Italian border. The Slovenians have bogged the tanks down and are busting them.”

“But it’s insane,” Amelia said. “Everybody’s lost their mind.”

“The generals seem to think it makes perfect sense,” said the bespectacled man by the window. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke towards the ceiling, his head leaning back, then stared out to the street, where a group of loud young men was passing, waving Croatian flags.

Interview with Jani Anttola

Tell us about your main characters and who inspired them.

The two main characters, a Bosnian married couple, are real people. The story itself is closely based on what happened to them and to others around them. It’s a sort of timeless one that could have taken place anywhere, with individuals trapped in the chaos of war and whose driving force is love and trust for each other.

What are the best and worst pieces of writing advice you ever received?

The silliest one I’ve seen was an article by a literary consultant who basically said that before you start, you should draw up a list of recent best-selling titles in your genre and study those books closely for their narrative, characters, story and style, because that’s “what the industry expects.” In other words, get rid of those annoyingly authentic edges of your literary voice with the slop-cookie cutter. But I think it was Hemingway who, in his memoir A Movable Feast, gave the advice that is somehow the best and the worst in parallel, depending on how you take it: “You shouldn’t write, if you can’t.”

How do you handle changes requested by editors or publishers?

A good editor is often right, so I trust their advice will make my work stronger. The trouble is, how do you know they’re a good one if you haven’t worked with them before?

What is your favorite quote and why?

Not sure if it’s my favorite, but here’s a good one: “It’s no joke being poor. Poverty is a giant, it uses your face like a mop to clear away the world’s garbage. There’s plenty left.” It’s by the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He wrote it almost a hundred years ago, but it’s still fundamentally relevant in this so-called golden age when the elites have taken the wealth inequality to preposterous proportions.

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

It wasn’t really a pilgrimage, but I once worked as a doctor on Sakhalin, an island in the Russian Far East. This was a hundred years after a doctor named Chekhov had worked there. In Chekhov’s time it was a penal colony. He described the sordid conditions of the convicts and the common people alike, the complete shit and misery. Now living was modern, but it was still like one huge gulag of fatalistic thinking. Everybody was doing life. The absence of social critics like Chekhov was the one obvious difference. They weren’t very keen on looking in the mirror. That’s Russia, generally. It’s a sick country. This is not to disparage the people, it’s just that they don’t have many parameters of a healthy society either. Anyhow, Sakhalin was a good place to write. I was working on a novel to be published in Finland. It was Christmas time and when it started snowing it went on for six days. The locals were quite unprepared when that strange white stuff started piling up. A complete chaos. There was a college canteen next to my apartment where I went for my lunches and the food was always agreeable and it was warm inside, and I remember thinking how the people were nice, anyway. 

AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Jani Anttola is a Finnish novelist and a medical doctor. In the 1990s he served in Rwanda with the French military and fought in Bosnia as a soldier of the Bosnian army. His works have been published in the UK and Finland. He has spent most of his adult life abroad, working in Africa, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific.

Connect with Jani Anttola

Website

 

Giveaway:

$25 Amazon/BN GC

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