Girl, Interrupted

Reconnaissance is also about the "deathlock of greater history and smaller destiny". It is the chronicle of a family wrenched apart by the political tumult in the Balkans. Up till the age of 16, Nadedja's world is located in an impoverished Bulgaria. It is here that she has felt the first piercing stabs of sexual longing, walked on the beach with her teenage sweetheart Anton, watched her parents quarrel and make up, listened to family stories. Family myth embraces her uncle and grandfather's escape to New Zealand-the farthest place in the world from communist oppression-and the subsequent deportation of her grandmother and mother to a nightmarish camp. Their home in Sofia is seized by the authorities; Nadedja lives out her childhood in a grimy, featureless apartment block.

Nadedja's frequent somnambulism mirrors her actual travels. She is sleepwalking through New Zealand, interrupted off and on by the forced camaraderie of fellow backpackers, whose regular innocuous opener, "Where are you from?" unwittingly echoes her turmoil. Her parents are separated and she lives with her mother and uncle in New Zealand, thus becoming the envy of most of Sofia. She has just returned from seeing her father after years of separation. She has tried-unsuccessfully-to convince him to join them in the new country. In the course of a few intense weeks, Anton has told her that he will love her forever; she has marched to parliament with him, to protest against the post-communist socialist regime. She has seen the police battering to pulp hundreds of student protestors and felt at one with the throng. Faced now with the pleasantly bland plenitude of her new home, where she can buy sanitary towels "with wings", she finds herself an exile yearning for the ravaged city of her childhood.

Nadedja travels through tourist sites in a surreal haze, connecting with little that her fellow travellers find of interest. Personal memory, familial memory, history and dreams repeatedly invade her consciousness: by the deft dovetailing of all these elements with the present, her journey is successfully woven in with those of her ancestors. Resolution is not easy when the oppressed are found to be implicated in the evil. Eventually, the pain and jolt of her first heartbreak propels her towards the man who can provide her with some answers and a resting place.

This ambitious book was adjudged the best first book in the Pacific region in the run-up to the Commonwealth Book Awards, and deserved it. The author, not very much older than her heroine, has earlier published award-winning poetry. Her heroine, however, dislikes poetry, finding it "precious". Parts of Reconnaissance are precious, sometimes purple. At points, the journey is rough going for the reader. But where it is not, the prose is exuberant, inventive, often poetic, and tells a compelling story.