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You should read Aleksandar Hemon's memoir for the same reason you should read his fiction: He is not only a remarkably talented writer but also one of the great social observers, a cultural anthropologist who seems at home everywhere and nowhere and who balances despair with hope, anger with humor.

And it's not all sad. Eventually, by walking the streets of his new city, by playing soccer and chess with international misfits, by falling in and out of love, by marrying and having children, he finds in the U.S. what he got from Sarajevo: "a geography of the soul."

Benjamin Percy's latest book, Red Moon, will come out in May.

Read an excerpt of The Book of My Lives