Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living, by Courtney Angela Brkic

When she was twenty-three-years-old, Courtney Angela Brkic joined a UN-contracted forensic team in eastern Bosnia. Unlike many aid workers, Brkic was drawn there by her family history, and although fluent in the language, she was advised to avoid letting local workers discover her ethnicity. Brkic helped set up a morgue in Tuzla, assisting pathologists with autopsies and laying out personal effects for photographing. Later, she helped excavate graves at Srebrenica, where many thousands has been indiscriminately slaughtered.

As Brkic describes the gruesome work of recovering remains and transcribing the memories of survivors, she also explores her family's history in Yugoslavia, telling of her grandmother's childhood in Herzegovina, her early widowhood, and her imprisonment during World War II for hiding her Jewish lover; and she uncovers a shocking family secret.

The contemporary and historical strands movingly illuminate each other, giving us a unique perspective on the tragedy of the Balkans. The Stone Fields is a powerful and wise book about family secrets and the aftermath of war.