AFTER BEING diagnosed with breast cancer, Vesna Goldsworthy wrote this memoir as a record of her life for her young son.
She grew up in a middle-class home in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, under Tito but left her homeland in the mid 1980s to marry an Englishman.
Some years later, war came. She watched on TV from this country as NATO bombs fell on Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Shortly afterwards, she was diagnosed with cancer. The book focuses on Goldsworthy's efforts to reconcile her roots with a new life in a foreign country.
Like an extended dream, most of the stories about her life and family spring up seemingly at random, which can prove confusing, particularly in the first half. But this is how memory works and the tales are told so vividly and wittily that it is difficult not to be drawn in.
There is much poetic, honest and unsentimental writing in this memoir, which unexpectedly succeeds in weaving a series of apparently unconnected memories into a story which dips, soars and moves.
Chernobyl Strawberries by Vesna Goldsworthy is published by Atlantic Books priced £14.99.
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