Some days, it doesn’t pay to be a lapsed pretend Buddhist, particularly when you�ve been charged with a lengthy list of war crimes. Zavida Zanković’s world has come undone. Caught up in the insanity of war and the capers of a larger-than-life father, he has subsisted on the black market, been forced into the army, deserted when trying to save a young boy trapped beneath a mountain of corpses, and lived by his wits. Now, he awaits trail on a dizzying array of charges — Fomenting Treason, Providing Material Support for a Terrorist Organization, Consorting with History. He has survived the Balkan wars with only his life and a lamb to show for it. To keep his sanity, he gathers up the threads of his past and spins an audacious narrative that includes a levitating holy man, “bombs” of western consumer products, and stories that may or may not be true.

In this sly, often amusing novel, Chris Gudgeon exposes the universal human experience like never before, crafting a transcendent tale that leads through some of the darkest moments of the late twentieth century. As he weaves strands of Balkan mythology into the real events of war, Gudgeon creates a story that blurs the distinction between fact and fiction, between the stories we tell ourselves and those that we tell others.

“Song of Kosovo is half galloping Bildungsroman, half treatise on the fraught interplay of truth, lies, and myth in what we end up calling history. … One night, as the bombs fall on Belgrade before Zavida is kidnapped into service, his girlfriend asks him why they are still fighting. His answer: “Because the Americans and Russians … are still in a pissing match, and Kosovo is their urinal.” The moment pinpoints the novel’s rage against corrupt leaders and global power plays, while the little people continue to die in their beds, their streets, and their barnyards.”
– Quill & Quire

“Song of Kosovo is a remarkable first novel. … Chris Gudgeon has written a fever dream of a book … It is exhilarating to see a new Canadian novelist attempt a work this ambitious. … He has uncannily captured the tone of a European novel in translation. The nearest Canadian parallel might be Jack Hodgins’ rollicking magic realism in The Invention of the World. There are also echoes of that great 18th-century picaresque, Tristram Shandy.”
– canada.com

“A sly, frequently amusing and penetrating distillation of estrangement and social chaos set during the Balkan wars of the late 1990s … This is not an attempt to reproduce the tragedy of war with documentary zeal; rather it is a literary journey emboldened by wit and artifice, a perfectly executed literary conceit.”
– BC Bookworld

“Riotously funny.”
– Winnipeg Review

“What the author has created is not a work of documentary realism, but rather a collection of sense impressions of a country and a people undergoing catastrophic suffering. But Song of Kosovo is not a nihilistic book. By rejecting the dictates of strict reportage and producing instead an impressionistic work that combines history, myth, and legend. Gudgeon has written something that cleaves closer to emotional reality than naturalism ever could. The novel is tough, mordantly funny, but, above all, honest.”
– stevenbeattie.com

“Wow! I had no idea that Gudgeon was a Serbian name, but after reading Song of Kosovo, I almost believe it is. Zavida Zanković is a character you’ll never forget. Chris Gudgeon skilfully brings his voice to life, singing the funny but sad “Song of Kosovo” to his elusive muse Nexhmije Gjinushi. Now there’s a name that will trip most tongues.”
“A richly layered story of memory and its myths, of love and loss, with a vein of dark humour running through it. Soaked in history and deeply ironic. Splendid!”