Chernobyl Strawberries: A Memoir

Vesna Goldsworthy breezed through life a top student at Belgrade University, a presenter of a fashionable radio program, a poet who performed her work to a crowd of 30,000 people, a member of the Yugoslav League of Communists, a descendant of one of the fiercest Montenegrin tribes, and, perhaps more than anything else, a pampered child of the Serbian middle class. In 1986, at the age of 24, she left Yugoslavia for London to marry an Englishman she had met at the Karl Marx Institute in Bulgaria two years previously. She had no doubt that she would be just as good at being English. At the BBC World Service, where she worked for seven years, she broadcast news bulletins about her own country's bloody dissolution and learnt, faced with the ghosts of her childhood amid the rubble, that she could still tell her side simply by how much it hurt.

* Good condition*