 From Mostar to Penrith – the story of one teenager’s escape from war torn Bosnia and her first eventful years living in the UK.
When the Bosnian war broke out in 1992, Vesna Maric was a typical sixteen-year-old. Suddenly a trip to a café or an illicit cigarette became a dangerous activity, and then impossible as the shelling began and snipers appeared in the cities. Fleeing the country on a cramped coach, Vesna soon realised she was that half-pitied, half-feared thing: an asylum seeker. In her memoir – Bluebird - she recalls the long journey to Britain and her first years living in the UK, full of rain, the whirr of English, and boys who loved The Cure. Yet, cut adrift, without anything but the clothes she stood in, Vesna thrived. She fell in love with the supermarket checkout guy, lived in dodgy digs and did menial jobs. But she refused to be patronised by her well-meaning British hosts and when she finally received permission to remain in the UK she decided to revisit Mostar, to find that her hometown had been destroyed, and that her slippers, still under her bed, no longer fitted. She joins Jenni in the studio.
Bluebird by Vesna Maric is Radio 4’s Book of the Week from Monday, 19th January
(0945 – 1000 rpt. 0030 – 0045).
Bluebird is published by Granta on February 2nd, ISBN-13: 978-1847080578
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