This is the story of Alma, a 14 year old girl coming of age in a city ravaged by war and anarchy. Alma is a plain but precocious adolescent, a daydreamer who has taken up residence with a group of teenage war orphans in the abandoned Hotel Sarajevo. They live as a family for more than a year scavenging for their daily needs. Hotel Sarajevo is a powerfully evocative novel of exquisitely worked moods and images and Alma, the narrator, is a complex fictional character. She is at once a child playing with her rag doll, a sexually aware teenager, and a young woman with highly developed...