I just finished an awfully good debut novel by a young writer named Thomas Leveritt called The Exchange-Rate Between Love and Money. The book takes place among a group of international expatriates who have come to Sarajevo in the still-shaky aftermath of the conflict in the nineties. Quick-buck artists, soldiers of fortune, peacekeepers, international aid workers, war crimes investigators, all drinking and fucking and falling in love. A Brit who served in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces, Leveritt is very good with creating scenes and with dialog, capturing accents more with speech patterns and word choices than with spelling adjustments. He’s got a lot of characters and sometimes I got confused , but on the whole, I liked it very much. I think I kind of hate the cover, though.
