Nina Bunjevac's estranged father, a Serbian nationalist militant in exile, died in 1977 when a bomb he and two associates were assembling detonated prematurely, killing all three. His stated cause, violent opposition to Tito's Yugoslavia, produced no political result; its one concrete outcome was his own death and the fatherlessness of his children.
The father's militancy is traced back through family history to the trauma of WWII Yugoslavia, where Serb, Croat and partisan violence left wounds passed down as identity. The memoir frames individual extremism not as spontaneous but as the accumulated residue of ethnic atrocity carried forward through family memory.
Having no living memory of her father, the author assembles him from photographs, documents, and relatives' accounts, making the act of investigation itself the way she comes to know him. This reframes a biography as something built from fragments by a survivor, where the gaps and second-hand sources are part of the portrait rather than flaws in it.