Daša Drndić

Distinguished Croatian novelist and playwright, Daša Drndić, has written a shattering contribution to the literature of our twentieth-century history. Trieste, her first novel to be translated into English, tells the powerful story of a mother who has waited over sixty years to be reunited with her son after he was stolen by German authorities as part of Himmler’s clandestine ‘Lebensborn’ project, a programme based on the theory of ‘eugenics’ developed to generate a ‘racially pure’ Germany. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trialsand interviews with second-generation Jews, as well as witness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. A broad collage of material is assembled, and the lesser-known horror of Nazi occupation in northern Italy is gradually unveiled.