The title of this charming book refers to the last summer the author spent in her native city of Belgrade in 1986, just before she married an Englishman and emigrated to London. Twenty-four-year-old Vesna Bjelogrlic, as she then was, picked berries in the hills near her home to make jam. Nearly two decades later, when she discovers she has breast cancer, she imagines that her illness had been caused by poisoned fruit. Ukrainian winds had borne fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor to her favourite strawberry fields.
As a medical diagnosis this may lack scientific rigour, but Goldsworthy could claim minor celebrity as a teenage poet and she makes the idea work effectively as a literary device. She uses a similarly visceral metaphor to compare the ravages cancer wrought on her body with the agonies of war and ethnic cleansing suffered in her homeland since she left it. This works less well — not least because Goldsworthy is thankfully still with us writing interesting books, and the country she grew up in has ceased to exist.
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