Juli Zeh Die Stille ist ein Geräusch (The Sound of Silence) Schöffling & Co., May 2002. 264 pp. . ISBN 3-89561-055-0 Juli Zeh, the twenty-seven-year-old German lawyer turned novelist, decides to spend a month in Bosnia Herzegowina, taking her dog with her. From Germany she arranges to pick up a car in Sarajevo and travels there by public transport. As many trains are not working, she has to go by bus. Dogs are not allowed on buses. Nevertheless she contrives to smuggle hers on board. The book consists of descriptions of the people she meets, often briefly, and the places she visits. Her travels take her to areas that have been wantonly destroyed, areas that appear almost untouched, areas of wilderness, and a tacky place of pilgrimage. She meets Moslems, Croats and Serbs, speaks German, Polish and English (she has lived in America), and develops a means of communication she calls 'Endepol' (English-Deutsch-Polish) which usually gets her by. One of the shocking and frightening things is the extent of the country not yet cleared of mines, including some places of outstanding natural beauty. Basically this book is asking why the ethnic cleansing and hatred erupted here, and what has happened since. Here are people returning to reclaim their property, now taken over by another ethnic group. But other more trivial questions arise in the author's mind. Why no McDonald's to market the huge numbers of melons for sale along one stretch of the road? Why are the figs left to rot on the trees instead of being harvested? The dog is a leitmotif running through the book. Sometimes he is an introduction, sometimes he is unwelcome. The culminating point of the journey comes when Zeh finds a starving stray dog with a pup, feeds the dog and brings the pup home with her. It was plucky of Zeh to make this trip, especially with her dog. She also tries admirably to look at both places and people without preconceived ideas and pays tribute to those trying to rebuild their lives without bringing in politics. A touch of the Bill Brysons detectable perhaps, but Zeh's style is her own.