Books Set in Croatia
Join me as we journey around the world in our book club. Pack your bags—we’re heading to Croatia!
From the cobbled streets of Dubrovnik’s Old Town to the windswept beauty of Pag Island, this month’s book picks are full of charm, heart, and adventure. The Dubrovnik Book Club brings together unlikely friends (and a mystery or two) in a seaside bookshop, while The Cheesemaker’s Daughter dives into family, identity, and finding your place in a community rich with history and tradition.
Book Club Pick – Croatia
The Dubrovnik Book Club by Eva Glyn
What is The Dubrovnik Book Club about?
In a tiny bookshop in Dubrovnik’s historic Old Town, a book club begins…
Newly arrived on the sun-drenched shores of Croatia, Claire Thomson’s life is about to change forever when she starts working at a local bookshop. With her cousin Vedran, employee Luna and Karmela, a professor, they form an unlikely book club.
But when their first book club pick – an engrossing cosy crime – inspires them to embark upon an investigation that is close to the group’s heart, they quickly learn the value of keeping their newfound friends close as lives and stories begin to entwine…
Eva Glyn on Literary Escapes Podcast
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Companion Book
Each month we choose two books to read from our destination. Here’s the second book!
The Cheesemaker’s Daughter by Kristin Vukovic
Genre: Contemporary Fiction
In the throes of an unraveling marriage, New Yorker Marina Maržić returns to her native Croatian island where she helps her father with his struggling cheese factory, Sirana. Forced to confront her divided Croatian-American identity and her past as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, Marina moves in with her parents on Pag and starts a new life working at Sirana. As she gradually settles back into a place that was once home, her life becomes inextricably intertwined with their island’s cheese. When her past with the son of a rival cheesemaker stokes further unrest on their divided island, she must find a way to save Sirana—and in the process, learn to belong on her own terms.
Exploring underlying cultural and ethnic tensions in a complex region mired in centuries of war and turmoil, The Cheesemaker’s Daughter takes us through the year before Croatia joins the European Union. On the dramatic moonscape island of Pag, we are transported to strikingly barren vistas, medieval towns, and the mesmerizing Adriatic Sea, providing a rare window into a tight-knit community with strong family ties in a corner of the world where divisions are both real and imagined. Asking questions central to identity and the meaning of home, this richly drawn story reckons with how we survive inherited and personal traumas, and what it means to heal and reinvent oneself in the face of life’s challenges.
More Books Set in Croatia
Beyond our two featured titles, here are even more books that invite you to journey through Croatia’s sun-drenched coastlines, historic towns, and storied islands. From sweeping romances and heartfelt memoirs to powerful historical dramas, these stories capture the spirit of a land shaped by resilience and beauty. Whether you’re uncovering wartime secrets in Dubrovnik, falling in love on the shores of Hvar, or rediscovering your roots in a mountain village, each book offers a vivid escape filled with history, heart, and the Adriatic’s irresistible allure.
Which book will you choose for a literary escape to Croatia?
The Collaborator’s Daughter by Eva Glyn
Genre: Historical Fiction
In 1944 in war-torn Dubrovnik Branko Milisic holds his newborn daughter Safranka and wishes her a better future. But while the Nazis are finally retreating, the arrival of the partisans brings new dangers for Branko, his wife Dragica and their new baby…
As older sister to two half-siblings, Fran has always known she has to fit in. But now, for the first time in her life Fran is facing questions about who she is and where she comes from.
All Fran knows about her real father is that he was a hero, and her mother had to flee Dubrovnik after the war. But when she travels to the city of her birth to uncover the truth, she is devastated to discover her father was executed by the partisans in 1944, accused of being a collaborator. But the past isn’t always what it seems…
The Getaway by Isabelle Broom
Genre: Romance
Most people travel to Croatia for its endless sunshine, pebbly beaches and crystal clear sea.
Kate goes there to disappear.
She needs to escape from a life that has fallen apart in spectacular and public fashion, and no one on the beautiful island of Hvar knows who she is or what she’s running away from.
Until she meets another lonely soul.
Alex is different to any man Kate has ever known, yet the connection between them is undeniable. She soon begins to open up in ways she never has before – not even to herself. But Kate is not the only person in Hvar hiding secrets. And, as she is about to discover, it is always only a matter of time before the truth catches up with you . . .
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
Genre: Historical Fiction
The Hired Manis an incisive, powerful novel of a small Croatian town and its dark wartime secrets, unwittingly brought into the light by a family of outsiders. Duro Kolak, a stoic lifelong resident of the Croatian village of Gost, is off on a morning’s hunt when he discovers that a British family has taken up residence in a house Duro knows well. He offers his assistance getting their water working again, and soon he is at the house every day, helping get it ready as their summer cottage, and serving as their trusted confidant. But the other residents of Gost are not as pleased to have the interlopers, and as the friendship deepens, the volatile truths about the town’s past and the house’s former occupants whisper ever louder.
The Olive Grove by Eva Glyn
Genre: Romance
Antonia Butler is on the brink of a life-changing decision and a job advert looking for a multilingual housekeeper at a beautifully renovated Croatian farmhouse, Vila Maslina, is one she can’t ignore.
Arriving on the tiny picturesque island of Korčula, Antonia feels a spark of hope for the first time in a long time. This is a chance to leave the past behind.
But this island, and its inhabitants, have secrets of their own and a not-too-distant past steeped in tragedy and war. None more so than Vila Maslina’s enigmatic owner Damir Maric. A young man with nothing to lose but everything to gain…
Running Away to Home by Jennifer Wilson
Genre: Memoir
A middle class, Midwestern family in search of meaning uproot themselves and move to their ancestral village in Croatia.
Jen Wilson, her architect husband, Jim, and their two children had been living the typical soccer- and ballet-practice life in the most Middle American of places: Des Moines, Iowa. They overindulged themselves and their kids, and as a family they were losing one another in the rush of work, school, and activities. One day, Jen and her husband looked at each other—both holding their Starbucks coffee as they headed out to their SUV in the mall parking lot, while the kids complained about the inferiority of the toys they just got—and asked themselves: “Is this the American dream? Because if it is, it sort of sucks.”
Jim and Jen had always dreamed of taking a family sabbatical in another country, so when they lost half their savings in the stock-market crash, it seemed like just a crazy enough time to do it. High on wanderlust, they left the troubled landscape of contemporary America for the Croatian mountain village of Mrkopalj, the land of Jennifer’s ancestors. It was a village that seemed hermetically sealed for the last one hundred years, with a population of eight hundred (mostly drunken) residents and a herd of sheep milling around the post office. For several months they lived like locals, from milking the neighbor’s cows to eating roasted pig on a spit to desperately seeking the village recipe for bootleg liquor. As the Wilson-Hoff family struggled to stay sane (and warm), what they found was much deeper and bigger than themselves.
Under a Croatian Sun by Anthony Stancomb
Genre: Memoir
Have you ever dreamed about dumping everything and leaving the humdrum of urban living for a new life of blue skies, warm sunshine and sparkling seas?
For Anthony and Ivana Stancomb, the decision to move from Fulham to Vis, the remotest island off the coast of Croatia, was easy, but fitting in with the locals was one of the hardest things they had ever had to do. Faced with a language barrier and sceptical locals, Anthony and Ivana tackle risky boats, fierce grandmothers, star-crossed lovers and the establishment of Croatia’s first ever cricket team.
Little by little our undaunted couple became islanders in their own right, and a few hearts are melted along the way. With the Adriatic Sea as its backdrop, Under a Croatian Sun takes the reader on a journey from the grey concrete of London to a ramshackle village in Croatia – a village proudly defined by its tragic history, unique café culture, fishing and potent alcohol. This warming account of following your heart shows how, with a bit of courage and an open mind, home is wherever you make it.
Split by Alida Bremer
Genre: Historical Fiction
It’s 1936. The seaside-resort village of Split on the Adriatic coast bustles. The tourist spots are booming, passenger steamers dot the harbor, and Jewish émigrés have found tenuous refuge from persecution. But as war in Europe looms, Split is also a nest of spies, fascists, and smugglers—and now, a locale suspiciously scouted by a German Reich film crew. Then one summer morning it becomes the scene of a murder investigation when a corpse is found entangled in fishing nets in the port.
With so many suspects from all walks of life and with a myriad of motives at a time when tensions are boiling over, crime superintendent Mario Bulat has only rumors to follow. Political archrivals will take advantage of the crime. Local lovers will become embroiled in it. And a propagandist filmmaker will find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. War is coming, and for some in Split, it’s already here.
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