The protagonist of “Chasing Homer” by the Hungarian Nobel Prize laureate Krasznahorkai has been on the run for many years, pursued by men who want to kill him. He travels along the Croatian coast and ends up on the island of Mljet. There, among a group of tourists, he learns from a guide that this is where Odysseus was reputedly detained by the nymph Calypso, preventing his return home.
Andrej is a postman in a small Croatian coastal town in the 1980s. To supplement his income and stay informed about local events, he secretly opens the letters he is supposed to deliver. He uses this information to blackmail Josip, the driver of the town’s cable train. However, when Josip discovers Andrej’s illicit activities, he begins to blackmail Andrej in return.
“The Brass Age” is an epic family novel that recounts the lives of Kempf and Vera, who meet after the Second World War and fall in love. Kempf is a Croat with German roots (a so called ‘Volksdeutscher’), who was forced to ‘volunteer’ in the SS during the war. He deserted when sent to fight in Poland and later joined the Russian Red Army. Vera, meanwhile, was a Croatian communist Partisan during the war. Despite their love, the weight of their past looms heavily over them.
An English woman and her two children spend a summer in Croatia to refurbish an old farm into a holiday cottage with the help of a local handyman. Step by step, she uncovers the dramas that took place in the village during the wars of the 1990s.
A 65-year-old man retires to a small town on the Croatian coast. He has been diagnosed with cancer, and reflects on life, illness, and the dark episodes of 20th-century Croatian history, including Nazism, Communism, and the ethnic wars of the 1990s.
At the onset of the Croatian War of Independence in 1991, the protagonist, a 9-year-old girl from Vukovar, is sent with her brother to the Adriatic coast. Weeks later, their mother arrives, but their father disappears in the war when defending their hometown against the Serbs. The family, along with other displaced persons, finds shelter in a building in Kumrovac that they nickname Hotel Tito, after the former Yugoslav president who was born there.
Dada is a young Croatian woman who returns from Zagreb to her hometown Split, where nothing seems to have changed since she left years earlier. She investigates the presumed suicide of her brother Daniel, which leads to a series of unexpected encounters and discoveries.
“The Walnut Mansion” is a sweeping, multi-generational novel centred on the life of Regina Delavale, a Croatian woman, and the intertwined lives of her family members. Spanning from the early 20th century to the dawn of the 21st, it weaves their personal stories into the broader fabric of Croatian history, offering vivid insight into the region’s complex and turbulent past.
Despite its title, “Our Man in Iraq” is mainly set in Zagreb, Croatia. A Croatian journalist convinces his boss to hire his cousin as a news reporter during the Iraq War in 2003. When the cousin goes missing, the journalist tries to conceal his disappearance from his family and the newspaper.
“Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh” is a novel about a married couple who reluctantly nurse an old aristocratic woman on the Croatian island of Rab. They long to resume their own lives and feel trapped, secretly wishing the elderly woman would pass away.