Translated by Celia Hawkesworth

‘The story of a shattered life can only be told in bits and pieces’

A pink cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer-bottle opener: these are some of the contents of Roland the Walrus’s stomach, displayed in the Berlin Zoo. As our narrator wanders the city, she recalls the objects and memories, dreams and reflections that make up her life – a photo album, a recipe, a fleeting love affair – as they connect to reveal the fractured reality of being an exile. Written in the aftermath of the breakup of Yugoslavia, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a quietly profound, absurdly humorous meditation on displacement, yearning and the weight of the past.

‘A writer to cherish’ Susan Sontag

‘She wrote in a deeply melancholy vein as well as with adroit comic wit’ Marina Warner

Dubravka Ugrešic is a writer to be followed. A writer to cherish -- Susan Sontag
The philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives -- Charles Simic
She wrote in a deeply melancholy vein as well as with adroit comic wit… an unusual mixture of Orwellian stringency and madcap lightness -- Marina Warner

Dubravka Ugrešic was born in 1949 in the former Yugoslavia and lived in Amsterdam. The author of several novels and volumes of essays that have been translated into over 30 languages, she was the winner of several major literary prizes including the 1998 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. She was shortlisted for her entire body of work for The Man Booker International Prize 2009. She died in 2023.