The acclaimed and bestselling author Kim Echlin discusses her new book Speak, Silence (Penguin, 2021), a novel that looks at the lives of three people drawn to one another amidst post-war Sarajevo, with Joseph Planta.

Speak, Silence by Kim Echlin (Penguin, 2021). Click to buy this book from Amazon.ca: Speak, Silence

Text of introduction by Joseph Planta:

I am Planta: On the Line, in Vancouver, British Columbia, at TheCommentary.ca.

For International Women’s Day today, we go to the interview I taped last week with the acclaimed and bestselling author Kim Echlin. Her new novel is Speak, Silence. It is a book with the Bosnian War as it’s backdrop, as her characters navigate the fallout of the conflict. Gota is a magazine journalist from Toronto, who remembers the intimate year she spent in Paris with Kosmos. Now, with a film festival to be held in Sarajevo she’s assigned to cover, she goes hoping to meet Kosmos and to reconnect. In the eleven years since Paris, she has had his daughter, and now as they meet again, he is with Edina. And they’re all drawn to each other. I’ll get Ms. Echlin to tell us about her book and these characters, this part of the world, and the various themes in it such as war, war crimes, genocide, loss, shame, and strength. Edina is a lawyer, and someone who works now to expose sexual violence and fight for justice. She works with women in the community, who were abused and raped during the war, and she takes down their stories in the hope of bringing perpetrators to justice. This all takes place just as the International Criminal Court in The Hague is coming into being, and the book sees Gota travel there and hear the harrowing stories that are told as part of prosecuting war crimes. The book is getting great notices and is being lauded for its lyricism, and in one review, it’s hailed as a necessary book to read. Kim Echlin is the author of the novels Elephant Winter, Dagmar’s Daughter, Under the Visible Life, and The Disappearance, which was a bestseller and shortlisted for the Giller Prize. This new book is published by Penguin. She joined me from Toronto last week. Please welcome to the Planta: On the Line program, Kim Echlin; Ms. Echlin, good morning.

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