This excellently produced little paperback from a new Australian publisher, Common Ground Publishing, comes with a story behind it. Dusan Velickovic may be remembered by some Australians; he came to this country for several months back in the mid-1980s under a Literature Board Familiarisation scheme, and on his return to Belgrade he did much to publicise Australian writing. Frank Moorhouse, B. Wongar, Robert Drewe and myself were published in translation in the then Yugoslavia as a result of his promotion, and there were probably others. Then, in the late 1990s, silence fell.

Sometime after the American bombing of Belgrade, I received, out of the blue, an email from Velickovic. As a literary editor and author, his voice had been stifled for some years, but he was still there, still alive, and had just started up a journal on the Web, called ALEXANDRIA, devoted to keeping Serbian writers in contact with the wider world, and re-knitting contacts. He e-mailed me a manuscript of his own, Amor Mundi, which was a diary of his day-to-day experiences in that battered city during the bombing. I found it terse, funny, erudite and very moving. I sent a copy to my agent, Rose Creswell, and this publication is the result.