The latest addition to my website is Dragan Velikić‘s Islednik (The Investigator). This is an autobiographical novel and the narrator tells us about his life, and in particular life of his mother and her friend Lizeta going back to well before his birth up to the present time. His mother is obsessed with keeping details of her life including reports on all the hotels she has visited and is somewhat critical of her son, telling him that he should only write the truth and not fiction. The book jumps backwards and forwards in time and we learn not only about his life and that of those closest to him but also follow the huge changes in the region where he lives with people going to bed in one country and waking up in another. Velikić is a first class storyteller but at the same time we learn a whole amount about the complications of living in that region which was subject to many wars including, in particular, World War I, World War II and the Balkan Wars. He was highly critical of Tito, they’re not in public, but also very much opposed to the wars that follow the breakup of Yugoslavia and he leaves the country and lives in various places including, in particular, Budapest. He tells an excellent story or rather a host of stories about his family, various people, including famous ones, who lived in Pula where he was born and grew up and of course the whole sorry story of life in central Europe during a period of war and instability.