A woman hires a detective to find a wealthy Italian—the amateur sniper who killed her child while she held them in her arms in 1992 Sarajevo. In the 1990s, fascists and psychopaths from Western Europe traveled to the besieged city specifically to target children in what became known as the ‘Sarajevo Safari’. This mother doesn’t believe in justice; she wants revenge. The detective, a hardened, nihilistic anti-hero, must confront the reality that the violence inflicted on Sarajevo was also a spectacle, where people came to kill simply because they could.
A fierce novel about a very dark page of recent history, about how European civilization is drenched in blood–wrapped in the guise of a crime narrative. With sarcasm, insight, and little faith in human progress, Nikolaidis denounces the lack of an adequate punishment for episodes like the Sarajevo Safari, and the disquieting probability of the repetition of such a horror. Intersecting Balkan nationalisms with Italian Casa Pound and the Western alt‑right, he shows us that only by acknowledging the persistence of fascism, we can try not to be overwhelmed again and again by the banality of evil.
“Few writers possess that rare gift: the ability to respond to reality in an instant and transform the most explosive news of the decade into a novel. Sarajevo Safari is precisely that. And Andrej Nikolaidis is precisely such a writer—one who chooses to take this wartime event, smothered beneath a heavy darkness of silence and taboo, and shape it into a swift, tightly packed novel, compact as an explosive charge.” – Faruk Sehic
“Sarajevo Safari is not a novel about a past war. It is a novel about the mechanism that allows violence to repeat itself, that normalizes crime, that turns suffering into something banal. In his finest narrative manner, Nikolaidis leaves us with the unsettling understanding that evil does not always come from outside, that it rarely stays behind us, and that if we fail to recognize it, it always returns in another form.” – Kristina Ljevak Bajramović
128 pages – Original language: Bosnian/Bosnia-Herzegovina & Croatia (Hena Com, 2026).