The plot of this novel begins with the female narrator’s arrival on an unnamed Mediterranean island. She has inherited a house in an almost abandoned village and comes to see it; it is a good reason to get away from her daily struggles for a while. The landscape around her is nostalgically idyllic: crumbling stone houses, wild capers, homemade cheese, sunshine and wind. Everything suggests that there, at a distance from family, precarious jobs and urban routine, she’ll find a space for introspection, for facing her past, her desires and hopes; but the story takes an unexpected turn. Along with the house, the heroine inherited a dovecot with a flock of pigeons bred by her deceased cousin, Toni.

 

When she decides to release them from their prison, she has no idea that these homing birds will soon return bringing her six peculiar guests – Toni’s old friends. They organize a memorial party for him, and during three consecutive evenings they relate fragments of their shared past. Were they an international theater troupe that wandered the Mediterranean small towns in the seventies or active participants in the political turmoil of the age of lead – it is difficult for the heroine to decide. At the end of the party, before they go away, the strange guests explain the true nature of her newly acquired inheritance: along with the house, she gets the obligation to tell their story, a story she did not fully grasp.

 

And that’s where the Mediterranean idyll comes to an end: it will be replaced by a research into international terrorism in the 1970s, a personal revolt against the permanent clash of wealth and poverty, growing compassion for non-human living world and growing anger provoked by deadly business practices; the ‘meek heroine’ will plunge into cyber-subversions, anger and danger. To the fragments of her guests’ stories she will react by creating her own, a story that she will – when the storm she provoked subsides – almost unintentionally leave as a legacy to the new generation.

 

​

Additional Information:

Published 2023 (Croatian) – English translation - 9789538313592 – Paperback - 292 pages

 

Rights: World