Join us in Yester House at the Southern Vermont Arts Center for a very special author talk, Croatian cheese tasting and book signing featuring accomplished novelist and food & travel writer Kristin Vukovic. Visit us back at Northshire afterwards to shop a special curated collection of books and gifts all about cheese, sheep, and Croatia, as well as enjoy complimentary refreshments!

Vukovic’s acclaimed and captivating debut novel features a woman whose father summons her to their Croatian island from New York—and away from her evaporating marriage—to help him save his failing cheese factory. On the dramatic moonscape island of Pag, we are transported to strikingly barren vistas, medieval towns, and the mesmerizing Adriatic Sea to feast on mouthwatering descriptions of cheese, as well as 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.

“Kristin Vuković’s debut novel is a mouthwatering platter of culture, history, and the everlasting struggle for balance between tradition and progress….Vuković employs beautiful, all-encompassing sensory descriptions, from the smell of the herbs in the air to the squawk of seagulls, or the faded floral print on the sheets Marina had since before she could remember. These rich details build an enticing world.” —Donna Edwards, Associated Press The Cheesemaker’s Daughter’ is a culturally rich novel that will make you really hungry – Book Review

“The Cheesemaker’s Daughter takes us to Pag, an island where sheep’s milk becomes curds, partners become rivals, exes become new possibilities, and one woman finally becomes who she was meant to be. Deeply researched and fully inhabited, this novel is a thrilling, transformative read.” — Julia Phillips, bestselling author of Disappearing Earth, finalist for the National Book Award

“[D]eftly weaves together themes of identity and belonging, love and loss, and growth and acceptance….Reading it, I was transported to that windswept island and felt like I was watching over Marina’s shoulder on her journey.” —Blane Bachelor, Condé Nast Traveler – Women Who Travel Book Club, top summer reads

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.

Kristin Vukovic has written for Fodor’s Travel Guide, 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.