How To Be a Kosovan Bride

Naomi Hamill was born in Wales in 1979 but she moved to Hampshire aged six and lost her Welsh accent almost instantly. How to be a Kosovan Bride is her first novel. Naomi is a secondary school teacher living in Manchester. She visits Kosovo each summer and loves eating flija, a giant Kosovan pancake.

★★★★★ Hamill's writing is nothing short of extraordinary. She writes in a style scarcely encountered in fiction, addressing the reader as ‘you’ throughout the novel, and thus managing to make us feel unnerved that we have not done more to liberate women like the Returned Girl and the Kosovan Wife. This guilt adds to the sympathy we already feel for the protagonists, with their lack of names and characteristics failing to stop us connecting with them. The stories of the recent war are equally harrowing, and once again, the lack of the specific names of those they feature only serves to make them more moving, as we realise they could have been experienced by almost anyone who suffered through the conflict.