Sarajevo, 2003. Best friends Frito and Bannerman roll into town, still in search of the fortune they missed out on in the dot-com years. For a while it seems that soaking up reconstruction money isn't the worst plan ever. But then they both meet Clare, a prosecutor with the international war crimes tribunal, and they both realise she is the best person they've has ever met, and that they can't both have her as much as they would, ideally, like.

Meanwhile the city is overrun by black marketeers, poker hustlers, intelligence officers, and expat hedonists all high on Dayton money. By the time Frito and Bannerman have started bounty hunting men accused of war crimes, their lives have taken on all the risk - but very little of the money - that they'd bargained for...

Winner of the Betty Trask Award.

Prizes

Winner of Somerset Maugham Award 2009

Part love story, part hilarious political send-up, Leveritt's debut is hectic, intense and verbally dazzling * Guardian *
Brutal, crazed and hilarious * New Statesman *
There aren't many debuts with this scope. Leveritt's take on 2003 Sarajevo is a nutty, funny and constantly inventive ride -- Matt Thorne
Start reading and you'll be drawn into a manic tale of two on-the-make friends who hightail it to Sarajevo... a debut audacious enough to broach questions of heroism and justice -- Hephzibah Anderson * Daily Mail *
Thomas Leveritt's debut radiates a certain clued-up, slacker intelligence ... a chaotic combination of wisecracking irony, effortless confidence and a casual, almost lazy informality. Serving up political farce and human tragedy side by side, his story of a city in which everything has its price unravels at breakneck speed * Metro *
A hectic and humorous debut * Tatler *
Hectically entertaining * Arena *
Leveritt is adept at capturing the strange atmosphere of post-war Sarajevo...an ambitious attempt to capture the peculiar flavour of a forgotten country, a forgotten war * Independent *

Thomas Leveritt is half-American, half-British. This is his first novel. He has won the Carroll Medal for Portraiture from the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In addition, he has: programmed computers, aid-worked in Bosnia-Herzegovina, an Army Scholarship into the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, a Law Scholarship into Middle Temple, 28 cousins in Texas, and held the UK distribution rights for the very excellent beer Sarajevo Pivo.