Divine Child

In the early 1990s, as Yugoslavia comes apart, so does a woman the book calls only Mother. Her Croatian neighbours shun her for her Serbian roots, and the warmth she once brought to her family fades as mental illness takes hold and drags the whole household down with her. Her eldest daughter tells the story, drily and in fragments, now naive, now poetic. To look at the illness is to look at the family around it and at a society gripped by war, hatred, intolerance and economic crisis, where it becomes hard to say who is really sick and who is well: the novel is less about one woman's breakdown than about a sick person in an even sicker society.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Novel

Length

179 pages in the original

Genres

Family, War (assigned by AI)

Set in

Croatia, 1990s

First published

2012 by Fraktura

Author's age

41 when first published

ISBN

9789532664096 (original)

9789533513232 (Sandorf Passage, United States)