A Land without Sunsets

A biologist, more accurately a collector of seeds from endangered areas, Glorija Suton arrives in Split to pay a visit to her father in between two field trips. This visit will inevitably mean returning to father’s native place of Vrj, the hamlet of Sutoni, somewhere in the Dalmatian hinterland near the Cetina river. Over there she meets Jadran, her childhood friend, his daughter Alta, one or two invasive species, but also a task to replant trees. All of Glorija’s attempts to live in the moment for at least a second will be overgrown with the ivy of memory and her roots stemming deep from the past. From these pages, her life inundates us with experiences and emotions as dense and fragrant as Dalmatian plants: seductive, prickly, viscous and, finally, under the heat of the sun, wild and spontaneous.

Only danger brings salvation, which is why there is no place potentially more therapeutic for Glorija, a woman whose mother exists only in family myths, to finally face and reconcile with her father Žarko, to say to her father’s shadow at least in her head all those things left unsaid leading eventually to understanding and forgiveness. For Žarko was not an easy man. And neither was Glorija’s life, which took her from Sutoni, to Siromašna in Split, to fame in science. All this would never have happened were it not for her father Žarko. And the seed of love Grandpa planted inside her ages ago. For this insight, peace and a few well-buried graves had to be dug over. A Land without Sunsets, a debut novel by Marija Andrijašević, a winner of the Goran Award for young poets, seems to be made of fragrant resin from a Mediterranean tree which has the ability to heal the wounds of the Suton family tree and firmly stick to the readers.