Four books by writers from Slovenia, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with I Saw Her That Night and The Tree with No Name.
Slovenia's national poet is France Prešeren, whose poem Zdravljica (A Toast) provides the words of the country's anthem. He wrote in the nineteenth century under Habsburg rule, about three centuries after the reformer Primož Trubar printed his Catechism in 1550. Twentieth-century writers lived through wartime occupation, then Yugoslavia, then independence in 1991, and those upheavals still shape the fiction.
Start with Drago Jančar's I Saw Her That Night, in which a young woman's disappearance under occupation reveals the divisions between Germans, partisans and neighbours in Upper Carniola. His The Tree with No Name sends a Ljubljana archivist deep into the hidden stories of the wartime occupation. Vitomil Zupan's semi-autobiographical Minuet for Guitar takes its hero from wartime resistance through prison into postwar Yugoslavia, and Goran Vojnović's Yugoslavia, My Fatherland has a Ljubljana-raised officer's son confronting family secrets.
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A young woman's disappearance under WWII occupation shows the fractures of Slovenian society between Germans, partisans and neighbours in Upper Carniola.
A Ljubljana archivist is sent deep into the hidden stories of the wartime occupation.
A semi-autobiographical novel of a Slovenian man through WWII resistance, imprisonment and postwar Yugoslav Slovenia.
A Ljubljana-raised son of a Yugoslav army officer confronts family secrets, showing the Slovenian-Yugoslav split and the legacy of the 1990s wars.
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