The Naked She-Wolf - Tapa blanda

Self-hating, self-obsessed, morose yet highly perceptive and intelligent, Ana moves among trendy Zagreb intelligentsia like a spectre at the feast. Her brilliant first novel has remained unnoticed. If she were beautiful like her fascinating colleague Nina or famous like her handsome journalist friend David, the critics would eat out of her hand. When David comes up with a plan to test her theory, Ana plays along. But it is almost too late to save Ana from her demons: a dark secret has risen from the past, and a mysterious online admirer, Anton, seems to know everything... This postmodern book opens up the world of the contemporary urban life in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, to the English reader. Still scarred by the recent war for independence and trying for membership in the EU, Croatia is struggling to define its identity. Ana, too, needs to discover who she really is: a daughter, a writer, a friend, a woman?

Vesna Curo-Tomic is one of the most interesting modern Croatian writers and possibly the most modern one among them. Her urbane, ironic gaze, self-involved, self-regarding, self-pitying and self-parodying all at once, still somehow manages to register the quotidian in all its pathetic ghastliness without losing sight of its underpinning redemptive magic. Her virtuoso mastery of narrative form is as demanding as it is rewarding, propelling the reader towards an unexpected, breathtaking end. Born in 1954 in Sarajevo, Vesna graduated English Studies and Comparative Literature from Zagreb University. She is currently Programme Editor for Feature and Television Films at HRT (Croatian Radio and Television). In 2004, she published her first novel, the poignant yet hugely entertaining roman à clef “A Taxi to Television”. “The Naked She-Wolf” is her first novel to be published in English. She is married and has two children.