When I was writing The Olive Grove I was describing the view
from Vesna’s fabulous villa and wanted to know the name of the island. It was
called Daksa, and being an author at that point I disappeared down a research
rabbit hole. It had actually been for sale for a very long time and was
apparently unsold because of its terrible past.
In October 1944 the partisans executed about fifty men
there, accused of having collaborated with the Nazis during their occupation of
Dubrovnik. There were no trials and the whole thing happened in days. A number
of sources believed it was a good excuse to get rid of their political
opponents. Others that mistakes had been made.
I bookmarked the information and moved on. Then, as I was finishing
An Island of Secrets, I needed a Croatian backdrop for my next book and it came
to mind. To be honest, I had never really forgotten it. But my main driver for
the story was a contemporary romance with protagonists in their sixties, an age
group completely under-represented in romantic fiction. I already knew Fran had
been a carer all her life, but what if she had been born in Dubrovnik and
whisked away to England by her mother in 1944?
The timeline worked. On the day of the Daksa executions
there were British officers in the city, held prisoner in a hotel, presumably
so they wouldn’t find out what their allies were up to. And sixty-five years later
a group of archaeologists exhumed the remains of the victims and set about
identifying them using DNA.
So I had my story. And I had a nice little prologue too, the
day Fran (then Safranka) was born and her father Branko holds her. Maybe an
epilogue too, so the reader would know what happened in the end. But no, for
Branko that was not enough and he insisted I tell his story too. Sadly, not as a
full dual timeline because the research material just isn’t there. So many
records were destroyed during the communist era but I found a letter online
from one of the partisan commanders in Dubrovnik, and with that and other
snippets I put together the bones of the wartime narrative.
But The Collaborator’s Daughter is still really Fran’s story.
A 65 year old woman at a crossroads in her life, who somehow finds the courage
to visit the city of her birth alone. To face her demons and look towards the
future. And a very different future it turns out to be too.
