Vesna Goldsworthy breezed through life - a pampered child of the Serbian middle class, a top student at Belgrade University, a presenter of a fashionable radio programme, a poet who performed her work to a crowd of thirty thousand people. At the age of twenty-four, she left Yugoslavia for London confident that she would be just as good at being English. But then, more than a decade later, illness invaded.

In prose that is exquisite in its precision, Vesna tells the story of herself, her family and her lost country. Although purportedly an account of forty years in the life of a passionate woman, Chernobyl Strawberries traffics in the births and deaths of whole worlds. Vesna Goldsworthy s captivating memoir about learning to live and love in a new language marks the emergence of a stunning new literary talent.