King of Tuzla

Arnold Jensen op de Haar has had a slightly more jagged life-trajectory than your average Western European writer: he graduated as a senior officer from the prestigious state military academy in the Netherlands, commanded a force of UN peacekeeping troops during the Bosnian War, and then retired to become a full-time writer. King of Tuzla is a thinly-fictionalised account of that journey, infused with pathos and wit and the blackest of comedy.

King of Tuzla travels, with its protagonist, from the high-jinks of the military academy to the besieged Muslim enclaves of Bosnia. Here UN troops duck random mortar fire, bribe militias, get drunk and ogle pretty barmaids, all the while chafing under the frustration of having to sit around doing nothing whilst savage ethnic war rages all around them. At the same time, however, op de Haar rescues their fleeting contacts with the locals from oblivion, fleshing out the Dutch perspective with heartbreaking vignettes of life during wartime: the barmaid who gets ogled, the teenager glimpsed from the window of an armoured car. It is this empathy  for the victims, as well as the witnesses, that makes King of Tuzla both a brutally honest coming-of-age novel and an important addition to the literature of modern war.