Identity & Belonging

Explorations of self, belonging, and what it means to find your place.

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The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

Dubravka Ugrešić

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender explores exile, memory, and the fragmented experience of living after the breakup of Yugoslavia. Its unnamed narrator, a writer living in Berlin, moves through a world of photographs, objects, recollections, and encounters that evoke a lost homeland. Ordinary details—a family photograph, a recipe, a personal possession—become fragments through which she attempts to reconstruct a life disrupted by political upheaval and displacement. Rather than following a conventional plot, the novel unfolds as a series of reflections that mirror the instability of memory itself. Ugrešić examines how exile transforms a person’s relationship with language, history, and belonging, particularly when the country that once provided a sense of identity no longer exists in the same form. The novel portrays the difficulty of preserving a coherent self when personal memories are inseparable from a fractured collective past.

She Who Remains

She Who Remains

Set in a remote village in the Albanian mountains, She Who Remains follows Bekija, a young woman facing an arranged marriage under the strict traditional laws of the Kanun. In a society where family honour and patriarchal customs govern women’s lives, she makes a radical decision: to become a sworn virgin, taking a vow of chastity that allows her to live as a man under the name Matija. Her transformation has devastating consequences, separating her from Dhana, the woman she loves, and setting off a chain of violence that tears her family apart. Years later, Matija recounts their story to a visiting journalist, gradually revealing buried secrets and painful memories. Written in a lyrical, nonlinear style, Karabash’s novel explores gender, sexuality, belonging, and the cost of freedom in a community shaped by rigid social expectations. It asks what remains of a person’s identity when survival requires abandoning the role society has assigned them.

About this theme

Books: 2
Countries: 72

Countries with this theme

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Congo, Democratic Republic

Dominican Republic

North Macedonia