Zoë Brân Books

I visited Yugoslavia in 1978 as a tourist hoping for a good time; I returned 21 years later to a changed land.Sarajevo, Mostar, Dubrovnik . . . the names are carved into the psyche of anyone who watched a news broadcast between 1991 and 1996. Zoë Brân visited these places long before the crises of the 1990s, and returned to try to make sense of what had happened in the intervening years - and why.Zoë's compelling journey takes her from forward-looking Slovenia through beautiful but troubled Croatia, to the country most damaged by the conflict, Bosnia-Hercegovina. She explores the region's complex history and, as she delves into recent conflicts, lets those who lived through them tell their own stories. With compassion and objectivity, she asks what it is that sets apart one neighbour from another, and in almost every case receives the answer 'Tradition.'In the Krajina region of Croatia, an elderly Serb man, home after enduring four years in a refugee camp in eastern Serbia, answered: 'We went to school together and married each other and then we fought. For what? For this?' He pointed at the almost empty landscape around him. 'No, it was for tradition . . . for traditions we hardly remember the beginnings of any more.'

Intrigued by the many disparate views of Cuba, Zoe Bran visits the country of contradictions and, interweaving history and current events, personal and wider viewpoints, she paints a vivid and compelling picture of contemporary Cuba. She finds a land that has little in common with the tourist image of tropical paradise, encountering a different country whose people reveal an individuality and tenacity at once astonishing and humbling. Zoe Bran has always been fascinated by the gap between the ideals of the world's socialist countries and the arduous hand-to-mouth struggles of the people who live in them. Castro's Cuba is one of the last such places on earth. Seeking to understand the realities of Cuba today, Zoe travels the length of this beautiful island. Beneath the surface of music and dancing, cockfights and animal sacrifice, she finds a land of complex ambiguities: a fertile land where many hunger; an educated country with scant knowledge of the outside world, a nation exhausted by socialism but proud of its independence and history of revolutionary struggle. From Havana to the pastoral hinterland, Zoe talks with writers and artists, with expatriates, with committed revolutionaries and those desperate to escape abroad. Enduring Cuba presents a kaleidoscope of Cuba and its people, whose tenacity and endurance is at once astonishing and humbling.