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"He thinks he can recreate a shell by putting together all the shards. Insane!"

Shards is a fantastic novel. The structure is as it's called - it's shards. We move back and forth in time and perspective and form.

We see Ismet's life in California and his youth in Bosnia and trip to Scotland, sometimes through journal fragments, sometimes letters to his mom, sometimes straightforward narrative.

We see the experiences of Mustafa (who may or may not be Ismet) as a soldier and we see him appear and disappear in Ismet's life - through narrative that occasionally drifts into the second person, or repeats whole paragraphs, verbatim, that we've already read.

There's a sense that this is autobiographical, but also not. That this is Prcic as author wrestling with his demons by imaging an Ismet who is wrestling with the same demons:

"How is it that some shell that exploded long ago in Tuzla can reassemble itself, fly backward into the mouth of the mortar that shot it, get shot again, and reach me here [in California]? How is it that I can exist in both the past and the present simultaneously, be both body and soul simultaneously, live both reality and fantasy simultaneously?"

Prcic's prose is super readable and very visceral. He's not afraid of ugly images but doesn't overdramatize them. The prose and structure together make this move at a quick clip somehow, even though the story seems to be putting off getting to an ending that we already know from the start. Overall -- I recommend!