Talking Location With … Terri Lewis: FRANCE
Novel set mainly in DUBROVNIK
6th August 2024
The Collaborator’s Daughter by Eva Glyn, novel set mainly in Dubrovnik.
Sussex, 2010. Early in the novel we meet Fran, who has just buried her Daddy. She has recently hit retirement and is part of a larger family but she has always known that Daddy was not her biological father. Her mother left Dubrovnik towards the end of WW2, having lost the father of her child, Branko Milišić. Once settled in Sussex, she married and her mother produced two siblings for Fran; Patti resented her older step sister and has made it her life’s work to make Fran’s life hell.
The author wonderfully captures the tensions of a patchwork family and also delivers that real sense of abandonment when the second parent dies, that rudderless feeling of losing a reliable framework for life. It is at this point that Fran is tempted to go to Dubrovnik in search of her father, as she is aware of snippets of his life and that he may have been a collaborator, involved somehow in the end stages of WW2. It is unclear exactly how and why he never returned, and given recent life changing events, she is ready to find out more. It has taken all her resolve to book a Spring break in the city for a full 10 weeks, so that she can somehow re-anchor herself and discover more about what happened. And more importantly take her time delving into the past.
Her starting point is a DNA test which enables the authorities in Croatia to determine that she is a match with remains discovered in a mass grave on Daksa, an island, at present uninhabited in the Adriatic Sea.
And thus Fran sets off for Dubrovnik unsure of what she will discover, she has no idea of her father’s political affiliations at the time and has to brace herself for any eventuality. She is glumly aware that he just could have been on the wrong side. She is carrying with her a beautiful piece of jewellery that came into her possession from her birth father, via her mother and it seems that it is rooted in the Jewish faith, which further underlines her concerns about what she may discover. How did he come by it?
She hooks up with Jadran, who takes her by boat to the places she wants to visit and gradually they build a bond, helping her to uncover the past. The author maintains a good level of dramatic tension as Fran delves into her past. A gripping and well written novel.
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