Product Description

Vesna Maric left Bosnia the beginning of the war, at the age of 16, on a convoy of coaches of women and children heading for Penrith. "Bluebird" is her funny, vivid and immensely readable memoir of the experience. Maric describes the beginning of the war - the machine gun fire that sounded like a sewing machine in the distance - and her family's growing anxiety, culminating in the decision to send her and her sister to Britain. She makes the account of the four day coach trip to Penrith hugely entertaining - the personalities, the gossip and the dramas: Gordana, who looks like Xena Warrior Princess in tight lilac leggings and a long plait, weepingly revealing that she is pregnant, their interpreter descending into a nervous breakdown.They spend nights at Esso stations and days being shown alternate videos of 'The Snowman', the song from which haunts Vesna to this day, and, insensitively, the devastation in Mostar. They finally arrive in the vivid green of the Lake District, and are greeted by well-meaning but patronising volunteers. Maric is sharp and revealing on the presumptions the volunteers make about how refugees should behave, and the refugees' own resistance to the role. She tells about her love affair with a local lad, and her eventual moves to Exeter and Hull.Throughout she interweaves the stories of other refugees - love stories, stories of escape, stories about the strange clash between refugees and their hosts. Maric attracts touching and absurd stories like a magnet. In the intensely moving ending Maric describes her return to Bosnia years later, walking through the ruined streets of her town, and then realising her old slippers, still by her bed, no longer fit. Unlike many books on Bosnia, and refugees in general, "Bluebird" is never self-pitying, never grave. It's refreshing to read an account of these experiences filtered through the eyes of a teenager with attitude - written with brilliant comic timing, and a great storytelling gift.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30448 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Review
`An exquisite, careful writer ... Maric conveys the unsettling, often magical experience of losing her roots' - Sunday Times --Review

Review
`Her confident, beguiling voice .. is a voice we will hear more of in the future' - Guardian

Review
`There is a powerful story being told here' - Independent on Sunday

Customer Reviews

Vived and emotionally revealing.
I seem to have been given quite a few books lately which I normally wouldn't have bought for myself. Bluebird is one of them and my reluctance to read it was tempered by the fact that this Bosnian refugee spent much of her time in the UK in places close to my home.

The fact that she writes so well (I confess to looking for a translator's name on the book) must be testament to her own determination to learn but also to something good coming out of the friendship of local people. Her anecdotes are so vivid and recount our own domestic scenarios but from a refugee's perception - and it's not always a pretty sight. The fact that her story begins with the death and destruction in her own country, indeed in her home town leads one to view her commentary of the UK in a much more forceful light.

I don't know if Vesna Maric has the intention to write any further books; my copy was bagged by a friend before I wrote this review so I couldn't check. I hope she does. Her illumination of life is not only revealing but especially lively in its truest sense that I shall keep a watch out for her.

Bluebird
This is a wonderful memoir with a light touch that plays with the reader but manages also to underline its darker themes of war and loss, together with the writer's experience as a young refugee in Britain - a timely reminder to all of us of how our lives can be turned upside down in an instant. Without any preaching or whining, Maric turns a lens on our attitudes to refugees and the 'do-gooders' who surround them. Recommended.