Sarajevo under siege. The martyred, crucified city is the main character of this novel.
Horrified by the expression ethnic cleansing, Nila, a Parisian woman with Hungarian roots, heads for Bosnia to help make a documentary about the siege.
She shares civilians’ daily lives. The intensity of their exchanges, under the ever-present threat of death, raises them above themselves.
The abjection of war, the snipers, the rape camps and the common graves unleash in them an extreme life force.
For Nila, making love becomes the only urgent and important thing there is. She self-analyzes her emotional upheaval continuously, taking notes about everything she saw, heard and felt.
Fragmentary texts (tales, encyclopedia entries, short dialogues, newspaper clippings) inserted into her narrative reflect her own fragmentation.
Here is what she has to say about her own book: The return of genocide to Europe 50 years after the one against the Jews will surely need to be exposed by dozens of works of fiction before it can finally find its place in our balky conscience.

Rather than a novel of initiation, A Café on the Hill is a novel of reeducation, or better yet, of awakening – of the heart, of language, of dignity. The author excels at describing the quotidian, the details, the characters. The intelligent narrative adopts a new form: text fragments are inserted into the narration, bringing with them relevant echoes from another dimension.