As schoolgirls, they complete one another’s homework, Lejla covering math and Sara writing compositions in Serbian, each changing their handwriting as necessary: “I imagined I was you as I wrote It was during those rare, precious moments that your story really belonged to me and my pencil alone.” On the evening of their high school graduation, the friends orchestrate the simultaneous loss of their virginities to two awkward but convenient teenage boys on a riverbank. There are small intimacies, moments of comfort and envy, decades of wordless messages communicated through mere looks. Sara recalls a friendship so close, so achingly erotic, that at times it is not clear where one young woman begins and the other ends. The novel is a letter to and about Lejla, a composition that seems to be at once an act of love, a complaint, and the fulfillment of a promise. Writing in Vienna after their adventure is apparently over, Sara juxtaposes the linear quest to find Armin with scattered memories of her friendship with Lejla. Their rabbit hole is a Bosnia filled with empty tea parties, erotic quadrilles, imperious queens, and quite a few actual Leporidae.

Sara is ostensibly the good girl, whose education allows her to escape and ultimately write the story of their friendship. Lejla, like her namesake Lila, is cool, chimeric, and charismatic, an independent soul trapped by her economic circumstances and the brutal history of her region.

The book is billed as a cross between Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels (2011–’14), and indeed, Catch the Rabbit is a sensitively traced story of female friendship that recalls the troubled bond of Lenù and Lila in Ferrante’s novels. Lana Bastašić’s road trip novel Catch the Rabbit, originally published in Serbo-Croatian as Uhvati zeca (2018), won the 2020 European Union Prize for Literature and is now available in a generally capable English translation by the author. Despite her desire to escape Bosnia’s traumatic past and her own family’s complicity in it, the pull on her is too strong to refuse. When Lejla calls again, the formula demands that Sara will answer. She has abandoned her language and her family, finding some measure of comfort in the civilized blandness of Western Europe: an Irish boyfriend who spends all day dribbling crumbs over his computer, an unthreatening nudist neighbor, a pet avocado plant that grew almost by accident. Bosnia is not much of a draw for the émigré Sara. Lejla’s older brother Armin, missing for years, has now turned up in Vienna, Austria, and Lejla wants Sara to drive her there.

Sara is living a happy life in Dublin, Ireland, or a good enough semblance of one, when her childhood friend Lejla phones to ask for help.

Catch the rabbit lana bastasic