"In the spring of 1999, the world watched as more than 800,000 Kosovo Albanians poured over Kosovo's borders, bringing with them stories of torture, rape, and massacre. One year later, Paula Huntley's husband signed on with the American Bar Association to help build a modern legal system in this broken country, and she reluctantly agreed to leave their home in California and accompany him.

Deeply uncertain as to how she might be of any service in a country that had seen such violence and hatred, Huntley found a position teaching English as a Second Language to a group of Kosovo Albanians in Prishtina.".

"A war story, a teacher's story, but most of all a story of hope, The Hemingway Book Club of Kosovo is the journal Huntley kept in scattered notebooks or on her laptop over the eight months that she lived and worked in Kosovo. Neither a journalist nor a historian, she describes with a rare purity and directness her students' experiences during the war and the intimacy of the bond that she formed with them.".

"When Huntley asked her students if they would like to form an American-style "book club" that would meet at her house, they jumped at the idea. After stumbling upon a stray English-language edition of Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Huntley made copies of the book and proposed it as the club's first selection.

The simple fable about an old man's struggle to bring in his big fish touched all the students deeply, and the club rapidly became a forum in which they could discuss both the terrors of their past and their dreams for the future."--BOOK JACKET.