Brookline Books/Lumen Editions

Native Land 

A playwright and scholar returns to her birthplace of Yugoslavia to attend a conference on "language and literature, feminist theory and practice"—only to find herself embarking on an entirely different course. Here, in her native land, she finds how it has changed. A small resort town where she once lived brings back the memory of an old lover, quince ripening on the windowsills, the heat, the salt, the smell of the harbor where French tourists bathed sun-bronzed and bare. 

Anna finds herself a foreigner in her own land. We feel the tension as she visits an old disco and is mistaken for an American, taunted by young boys on the street, until she speaks her native tongue and is recognized, "tender and sweet," as one of their own. Native Land is an intensely felt novel of century-old cultural differences, of female identity as both foreigner and native, and of coming to terms with a bittersweet past and a surreal present. 

In the spirit of Marguerite Duras's The Sailor from Gibraltar and with the involving quality and descriptions in The Lover, Tesich's book recalls Yugoslavia as it was before the war: a land of beauty, where tourists flocked to resorts, and a place inhabited by people of grace, courage, and verve. 

"Written with grace and honesty ... deserves a place in all serious fiction collections." — Library Journal