My Family and Other Enemies

Mary Novakovich is an award-winning freelance journalist and travel writer based in Hertfordshire. Since 1999, she has been focusing on travel writing and contributes regularly to UK publications including the Guardian, Telegraph, Independent, Times, Evening Standard, The Lady and many others. She also broadcasts radio reports for the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent. During this time, she has written extensively about the countries of the former Yugoslavia, in particular Croatia and Serbia. Both her Serbian parents were born in the Croatian region of Lika, which she has visited numerous times since her first visit in 1976. Although she has written several guidebooks to Croatia for Insight Guides and Berlitz over the years, My Family and Other Enemies is her first travelogue. Here she combines her travels in the region of Lika with a memoir exploring her family's complicated and often tragic history in Croatia.

• Prologue Part 1 Summer 1976Part 2May 2004Part 3June 2009Part 4September 2011Part 5July 2015Part 6June 2019EpilogueAcknowledgements

'Tender, moving and beautifully written. Mary Novakovich makes the recent history of a turbulent region come alive in a book that is a joy to read. Highly recommended.'Peter Frankopan, author of The New Silk Roads 'Vivid, charming and bursting with life, My Family and Other Enemies is a tender and affectionate portrait of an area unknown to most of us, an area I'm now desperate to explore. I loved it.'Christina Patterson, author of Outside the Sky Is Blue 'A moving, bittersweet memoir of loss and belonging - and of one woman's search for identity.'Marcus Tanner, editor of Balkan Insight and author of Croatia: A Nation Forged in War 'Mary Novakovich's exploration of her family's experiences in a Serbian enclave within Croatia inevitably confronts some of the darkest chapters of recent European history, yet it brims with an infectious love of the landscape, the people, their culture and cuisine - and of life itself.'CJ Schüler, author of Along the Amber Route: St Petersburg to Venice 'When I walked through the Lika region of Croatia, following the Bora wind, I met a shepherd who boasted of the strength of Lika people (and Lika dogs). Reading Novakovich's enjoyable book, I now understand what he meant. My Family and Other Enemies is a fascinating exploration of a region that proudly sets itself apart, a journey through culture, history, landscape - and of course through family.'Nick Hunt, author of Outlandish: Walking Europe's Unlikely Landscapes 'Mary Novakovich leads us through the past - from an 11-year-old city kid thrown into primitive village life on a first trip to Croatia, though the years of trauma as Yugoslavia disintegrated - to a more hopeful future for a corner of Europe so blessed with beauty and humanity.'Simon Calder, The Independent