Weeds in the Garden of Eden: A Journey Back to Family Roots, and Life in a Traditional Croatian Village. by Unkovic, Barbara - 2013

London: Austin Macauley Publishers, 2013. Paperback small trade, good condition, black & white drawings, few colour photos, cancelled EX-LIBRARY (library barcode & spine sticker, rubber stamp, covered with contact plastic), front hinge slightly split (pages firm), minor edgewear. 226 pp. In 2005, the New Zealand author visited Croatia where members of her family had been living for the last seven generations. On the island of Korcula, the original home of her father’s family, she discovered her soul and began a new life in a peaceful, unspoiled paradise on the edge of the Adriatic Sea. This story is a rich, absorbing account of her purchase of a 200 year old, uninhabited stone house in the timeless village of Racisce. The author describes seasonal life amongst the lush vineyards and olive groves and her encounters with the tainted Croatian bureaucratic system in a land where the volatile inhabitants have spent the last 800 years fighting to gain independence.