Former Journalist's Searing Fiction Debut

If, as Mahatma Gandhi wrote in 1959, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” then things are not going at all well in the parallel lands that are the setting for David Savill's searing debut novel, “They Are Trying to Break Your Heart.” In its first 100 pages, in scenes in Bosnia during the war from 1992-95, and 10 years later in London and Thailand, terrible cruelties are visited on a variety of animals. The intimation, and soon enough a good deal more, is that they are proxies for the savagery we practice on one another.