Catch the Rabbit

A moving story about loss, forgetting and female friendship: two women on a roadtrip across Bosnia head towards a lost brother and a collision with the lies they've told themselves about where they're from.Sara lives in Dublin with her partner Michael, their avocado plant, and a naturist neighbour. If little trace remains of her old life back in Bosnia, of her mother tongue, this is not entirely by accident.So when she receives a call from Lejla, the best friend with whom she shared everything until their friendship ended suddenly on one summer day in college, asking her to return to Bosnia, to their home, she surprises herself by immediately saying yes. Lejla wants Sara to drive them from Mostar to Vienna, where Lejla's brother Armin has just been found - Armin who disappeared as a young man during the Bosnian War. Everyone was convinced Armin was dead - except Lejla and Sara.What follows is a road trip, but one that begins to stretch back into the past. Sara is forced to reconsider the things she thought she understood growing up: the best friend she once loved, the academic trials and first sexual experiences that the girls shared, but also the things that separated them: the Serbian Orthodox Christian customs and traditions that Sara's family began to practise, the less Muslimsounding name that Lejla's family hastily pinned to their door, and finally the loss of a brother.In Catch the Rabbit, Lana Bastasic tells the story of how we place the ones we love on pedestals, and then wait for them to fall off, how loss marks us indelibly, and how the traumas of war echo down the years.