The Borders of Hatred by Diego Zandel is a provocative and gripping novel about the inter-ethnic war in the former Yugoslavia, which led to its dissolution, a war which marks the thirtieth anniversary of its beginning. Originally published in 2002 by Aragno, it tells a story of violence and sorrowful pity.

A son, Bruno Lednaz, accompanies the body of his father, who had asked to be buried in Fiume, his hometown, then Italian, then Yugoslavian, and today, after the war in the Balkans, Croatian. A few months ago, in Dayton, in the United States, the peace agreement was signed, which establishes, after four long years of war, the division of the territories between Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Bosnian Serbs. Nonetheless, at the borders, the hatred triggered by the war is still alive. Bruno realizes this when, waiting for a place in the cemetery for his father, he decides to accompany a relative to Lika, a region of Croatia. From that moment on, a tragic odyssey begins for him, which will lead him to discover, through a series of adventures, passions, pains and betrayals, the dirty interests that hide behind a war.

Diego Zandel, an expert on the Balkans and one of the authors of the Rai Cinema documentary “Hotel Sarajevo” on the siege of the Bosnian city, which lasted from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996, takes us with this novel to the places of war to remind us, with this re-edition of the novel, while another war is underway in the heart of Europe, of the value of peace.

From the Introduction “The Borders of Hatred, a Great 'Central European' War Novel” by Andrea Di Consoli:

Of that tangle that is the Balkans; or rather: from the Italian reverberation to the eastern borders of that ferocious mess that, to quote Churchill, 'produces more history than it can consume', Diego Zandel is, in Italian literature between the end of the 900th century and the beginning of the new century, one of the most intense and passionate writers. With 'I confini dell'odio', which was published in 2002 by the publishing house then directed by the late Raffaele Crovi, Zandel wrote the best Italian novel on the wars that broke out in the former post-Titoist Yugoslavia.

Diego Zandel, The Boundaries of Hate, Gammarò, Novi Ligure 2022, 160 pp.