WINNER - TRAVEL NARRATIVE BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 (British Guild of Travel Writers)My Family and Other Enemies is part travelogue, part memoir that dives into the hinterland of Croatia. Mary Novakovich explores her ongoing relationship with the region of Lika in central Croatia, where her parents were born.. ''Lika is little known to most travellers - apart from Plitvice Lakes National Park and the birthplace of Nikola Tesla,'' she says. ''It''s a region of wild beauty that has been battered by centuries of conflict. Used as a buffer zone between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires for hundreds of years, Lika became a land of war and warriors. And when Yugoslavia started to disintegrate in 1991, it was here where some of the first shots were fired.''Shipped off to Lika as a child during the supposedly golden years of Tito to stay with relatives she barely knew, Novakovich has been revisiting Croatia ever since, researching the story of her family''s often harrowing life: in 1941 her aunt wa
