About this Event
Zibby's Bookshop is so excited to welcome Kristin Vuković to celebrate the launch of THE CHEESEMAKER'S DAUGHTER! Kristin will be joined by Julia Fierro.
About the book:
When Marina’s father summons her to their Croatian island from New York—and away from her evaporating marriage—to help him save his failing cheese factory, she must face her rocky past and an uncertain future.
How do you begin again when the past threatens to drown you?
In the throes of an unraveling marriage, New Yorker Marina Maržić returns to her native Croatian island where she helps her father with his struggling cheese factory, Sirana. Forced to confront her divided Croatian-American identity and her past as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, Marina moves in with her parents on Pag and starts a new life working at Sirana. As she gradually settles back into a place that was once home, her life becomes inextricably intertwined with their island’s cheese. When her past with the son of a rival cheesemaker stokes further unrest on their divided island, she must find a way to save Sirana—and in the process, learn to belong on her own terms.
Exploring underlying cultural and ethnic tensions in a complex region mired in centuries of war and turmoil, The Cheesemaker’s Daughter takes us through the year before Croatia joins the European Union. On the dramatic moonscape island of Pag, we are transported to strikingly barren vistas, medieval towns, and the mesmerizing Adriatic Sea, providing a rare window into a tight-knit community with strong family ties in a corner of the world where divisions are both real and imagined. Asking questions central to identity and the meaning of home, this richly drawn story reckons with how we survive inherited and personal traumas, and what it means to heal and reinvent oneself in the face of life’s challenges.
About the author:
Kristin Vuković has written for the New York Times, BBC Travel, Travel + Leisure, Coastal Living, Virtuoso, The Magazine, Hemispheres, the Daily Beast, AFAR, Connecticut Review, and Public Books, among others. An early excerpt of her novel was longlisted for the Cosmonauts Avenue Inaugural Fiction Prize. She was named a “40 Under 40” honoree by the National Federation of Croatian Americans Cultural Foundation, and received a Zlatna Penkala (Golden Pen) award for her writing about Croatia. Kristin holds a BA in literature and writing and an MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University, and was Editor-in-Chief of Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota and currently resides in New York City with her husband and daughter. For more information, please visit kristinvukovic.com.
Julia Fierro is the author of the novels The Gypsy Moth Summer and Cutting Teeth. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, Buzzfeed, Glamour, The Millions, Flavorwire, Lenny Letter, and other publications, and she has been profiled in Brooklyn Magazine, the L Magazine, The Observer and The Economist.
A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, she founded The Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop in 2002, which has grown into a creative home to 5,000 writers in NYC, Los Angeles, and Online. SSWW was named “Best Writing Classes” by The Village Voice, Time Out New York, and “Best MFA-Alternative” by Poets & Writers, Brooklyn Magazine and the L Magazine.
Julia lives in Brooklyn and Santa Monica with writer Justin Feinstein and their two children. She travels country-wide to give talks on the craft of writing, the business publishing, and on building creative communities.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1113 Montana Ave, 1113 Montana Avenue, Santa Monica, United States
USD 0.00
