Books from Croatia

Dada has been drifting through life in Zagreb, caught between a relationship with a married man and a job that leads nowhere. When her sister asks her to come home and help care for their aging mother, Dada leaves the city without much resistance. The coastal town she returns to, however, is thick with unfinished grief. Her mother stockpiles medication. Her sister smokes constantly. Their father's shoes still sit on the steps years after his death. And the bedroom of their younger brother Daniel, who died by throwing himself under a train four years earlier, remains unchanged, his cowboy posters still hanging on the walls.

Dada decides to look into the final days of Daniel's life, hoping that understanding what happened might release the family from its paralysis. The novel follows her search through a small Croatian town where silence, gossip, and old loyalties make answers difficult to find. Savičević writes about a generation shaped by economic stagnation and the long aftereffects of the 1990s wars, people who grew up in a country that was itself trying to start over.

The story is set against the Dalmatian coast, mixing domestic tension with a broader portrait of post-war Croatian life. Savičević is also known as a poet, and the prose carries a compressed, physical quality throughout.

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In Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga is a fearsome figure: a witch who flies in a giant mortar, lives in a house perched on chicken legs, and snatches small children. She appears across Russian and Eastern European culture in literature, film, animation, and music. Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic takes this old character as a starting point for a novel that follows four women in contemporary Eastern Europe, each facing questions about aging, identity, and visibility.

One woman is a writer who travels to her dying mother's hometown in Bulgaria to fulfill a final wish. Another is an elderly woman who wakes each day hoping it will be her last. A third is a hospital worker who has abandoned hope of finding love. The fourth is a serial widow with a hidden skill for writing. Ugresic connects their separate stories through the framework of the Baba Yaga myth, drawing out parallels between the ancient figure and the modern lives of women who feel overlooked or unseen.

The novel is structured as a postmodern retelling, layering folklore with present-day narrative. Ugresic, who left Croatia in the 1990s and became known for writing from a position of cultural displacement, brings a sharp and sometimes barbed tone to subjects like femininity and the experience of growing old.

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Croatian Tales of Long Ago is a collection of fairy tales by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, a Croatian writer sometimes compared to Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. The stories draw on Slavic folklore, populating their pages with goblins, sprites, and shape-shifting creatures. Settings range from dense mysterious forests to high mountain landscapes, and the characters include trusting children, protective grandfathers, and figures whose outward appearance hides a darker nature.

The tales do not soften the harsher side of life. Cold, cruelty, and human weakness appear alongside wonder and enchantment. Wicked neighbours and treacherous relatives pose real dangers, and the children in these stories face situations with genuine stakes. At the same time, the narratives follow an older pattern in which resourcefulness and plain kindness still count for something.

This English-language edition brings the collection to readers outside Croatia. The book belongs to a European line of writers who gathered regional oral material and reshaped it into written tales with named authors and a fixed printed form, meant for reading as much as for telling aloud.

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Cyclops is a semiautobiographical novel by Croatian writer Ranko Marinković, set in Zagreb during the Second World War. Its central figure, Melkior Tresić, is a young theater critic who chooses to starve himself rather than be sent to the front lines. As hunger and anxiety reshape his perception of the city, Melkior drifts through Zagreb in a state somewhere between waking life and hallucination, encountering the people who still occupy its streets and cafés.

The cast around Melkior includes fortune-tellers, actors, prostitutes, bohemians, and intellectuals, all carrying on their routines inside a society that is visibly fracturing. Marinković treats this world with dark humor and close attention to the absurd ways people adapt when the ground beneath ordinary life shifts. Melkior's self-imposed starvation is both a survival strategy and a slow collapse, and the novel follows his paranoid, weakening perspective without offering easy sympathy or heroism.

Originally published in Croatian, Cyclops appeared in English translation for the first time through Yale University Press. The novel belongs to the tradition of Central European modernist fiction, where the personal and the political press against each other in confined urban spaces during wartime.

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Matija is a young Croatian novelist with two well-received books behind him and a third that failed. His professional trouble runs alongside a personal collapse: his girlfriend has left him over his constant lying. The habit reaches far beyond his fiction. For years he has built false versions of his own childhood, filling gaps in memory with invention.

At the center of those gaps is his father's death, an event he cannot clearly recall. What remains is fear, anger, and a sense of responsibility whose origins he does not understand. Now, not yet thirty, Matija sets out to stop reinventing his past and face what actually happened to him as a boy.

His wish to reconnect with the woman he lost gives him a reason to try, though the memories he begins to uncover carry risks of their own. Kristian Novak is an award-winning Croatian author, and this is his first novel to appear in English. It examines how a private mythology can work as both shelter and trap.

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Istria is a peninsula at the northern end of the Adriatic Sea, divided today between Croatia, Slovenia, and a small strip of Italy. Paola Bacchia's book uses the region's food as a way into its layered history and mixed cultural identity. The recipes draw on home kitchens rather than restaurants, reflecting what families have cooked across generations shaped by Venetian, Viennese, Hungarian, and Balkan influences. Dishes range from semolina dumplings and beef goulash to apricot strudel and cinnamon-flavored biscuits, each one tied to a specific household or memory.

Alongside the recipes, Bacchia traces the stories of Italian-Istrians who stayed in the region after the border changes of the 1940s and those who left for other countries. Her own family connections to the Adriatic coast run through the book, linking personal recollection to broader patterns of migration and cultural persistence. Grain soups, seafood, and stacked crepes appear not as isolated dishes but as markers of place and season.

The book treats Istrian cooking as something shaped by overlapping borders rather than confined by any single national tradition. Gardens, coastline, and proximity to several culinary traditions all figure in the ingredients and methods recorded here.

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Miroslav Krleza, a Croatian writer who lived from 1893 to 1981, wrote On the Edge of Reason as a story about what happens when a single moment of honesty disrupts a carefully ordered life. The central figure is a middle-aged lawyer, well established and well regarded in his community, who attends a gathering of local notables. During the evening he speaks an unguarded truthful remark, and this small act sets off a chain of consequences that steadily dismantles his standing.

What follows is a confrontation between the individual and the social machinery around him. As others react to his breach of decorum, layers of pretense and collective self-deception become visible. The novel tracks how conformity enforces itself and how the structures people depend on for status and security can turn hostile the moment someone steps outside agreed-upon conventions. Krleza builds the pressure gradually, letting absurdity and hypocrisy accumulate until the boundary between reasonable behavior and unreason grows difficult to locate.

The book is set against a recognizably Central European social landscape, and Krleza draws on his long engagement with questions of political and cultural authority in the region. Susan Sontag described it as one of the great European novels of the first half of the twentieth century.

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Set in 2003, Our Man in Iraq follows Toni, a journalist working in Zagreb during a period when Croatia is shifting rapidly from its socialist past toward globalized capitalism. Toni juggles a precarious career, a demanding family, and a volatile girlfriend. In a rash moment, he suggests that his cousin Boris, an unpredictable Arabic speaker, travel to Iraq as a war correspondent. Boris accepts and begins sending dispatches from the conflict zone, but his reports grow stranger and harder to use.

Rather than confronting the situation honestly, Toni starts rewriting Boris's chaotic dispatches in secret, presenting them to his editors as credible journalism. The arrangement holds together until Boris disappears, and Toni finds that his own grip on what is real and what he has fabricated is slipping. The novel traces how personal dishonesty and larger political upheaval feed into each other, with Toni's small deceptions mirroring the bigger fictions circulating in media and politics around him.

Robert Perisic is a Croatian writer, and Our Man in Iraq was the first of his novels to appear in English translation. The story is rooted in Zagreb but extends outward through the Iraq War, connecting two very different countries caught up in periods of rapid, disorienting change.

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The Best of Croatian Cooking by Liliana Pavicic and Gordana Pirker-Mosher is a cookbook presenting over 200 recipes drawn from Croatia's varied food traditions. The collection reflects a cuisine shaped by geographic and cultural crossroads, where central European, Mediterranean, and Near Eastern cooking styles overlap. Recipes have been adapted for the American kitchen, adjusting ingredients and methods so that cooks outside Croatia can reproduce the dishes with locally available supplies.

Croatia's food culture shifts noticeably along its length. The long Adriatic coastline, with its warm climate and access to seafood, supports a style of cooking closer to Italian and Greek traditions, with olive oil, fresh fish, and herbs. Inland areas lean toward heavier dishes influenced by Hungarian and Austrian neighbors, featuring stews, roasted meats, and pastries. The book draws from both of these regional currents, giving a broad picture of what Croatian households and restaurants prepare.

Pavicic and Pirker-Mosher organize the recipes to cover everyday meals as well as special-occasion cooking. The range extends across appetizers, soups, main courses, and desserts, offering a practical reference for anyone interested in preparing Croatian food at home.

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Haya Tedeschi is an elderly woman sitting alone in Gorizia, a city in northeastern Italy near the Slovenian border. Around her lies a collection of photographs, newspaper clippings, and documents. She is waiting to meet the son who was taken from her sixty-two years earlier by German authorities under the Lebensborn program, a secret project organized by Heinrich Himmler to raise children considered racially suitable by the Nazi regime. The boy's father was an SS officer.

Haya's memories reach back through her family's history as Catholicized Jews in the region around Trieste, where Italian Jews were deported and killed in local concentration camps during the German occupation. Her search for her son pulls her through layers of evidence: trial testimonies from Nuremberg, interviews with people born to survivors, eyewitness reports of violence carried out nearby, fragments of poetry, and old maps. The novel by Croatian author Dasa Drndic assembles these elements as a broad collage, mixing fictional narrative with historical documentation.

The structure moves between personal memory and the public record of Nazi occupation in northern Italy. Drndic draws on real names, dates, and places alongside her fictional characters, blurring the boundary between novel and archive.

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Augustin Ujevic, known as Tin Ujevic, was a Croatian poet born in 1891 and active through the first half of the twentieth century until his death in 1955. This small English-language collection presents twelve of his poems, offering a rare point of entry for readers outside the South Slavic world. Ujevic is widely regarded as one of the finest lyric poets to have written in Croatian, and his reputation extends across the region that once formed Yugoslavia.

Throughout much of the twentieth century, many of Ujevic's lyrics were memorized and quoted by ordinary people across the former Yugoslav Federation, not only by dedicated readers of poetry. The record compares this broad cultural presence to the way certain early poems by W.B. Yeats circulate in Ireland and the United Kingdom, where lines are passed along by people with no special interest in literature. Despite this deep familiarity in his home region, Ujevic's work remains little known in English.

Twelve Poems is a bilingual or translated selection that tries to bridge that gap. It sits at the intersection of Croatian literary tradition and the wider European poetry of its era, a period shaped by two world wars and shifting borders across southeastern Europe.

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