The Collaborator’s Daughter is an outstanding novel. It makes you look back to the past with sadness and understanding and some regret, and makes you look to the future with hope and just a little bit of trepidation, all the while painting vivid word pictures of Dubrovnik, Croatia both near the end of World War II and in present day: beautiful, dangerous, irresistible.

At age 65, having lived nearly her entire life in England, Fran finds herself at loose ends. Unmarried, with a grown child and young grandchildren, a half-brother she adores and a half-sister who hates her, her mother has been gone for several years and the stepfather she has been nursing through illness has just died. Retired, no one to need her, no necessity of fitting in, Fran thinks if she can find the inner strength and courage that this may be the right time to finally find out more about where she came from, the hero father who died when she was an infant in Dubrovnik and fill in some of the blanks in the stories her mother told her about that time and place. The research she initially does tells her that instead of being the hero she was led to believe her father was executed as a collaborator. She almost turns right around and goes home, but she’s rented an apartment for three months and, with support and encouragement from her son, brother and good friend back home she sets out on what ends up being the adventure and discovery of her lifetime, not only for the past but for the present and the future as well.

The Collaborator’s Daughter is well-written, complex, detailed, intense and tells a fantastically entertaining story. Fran is likeable, insecure and brave at the same time, afraid to stay and learn things she doesn’t want to know but also feeling surprisingly at home in Dubrovnik. The local people are welcoming, particularly a young bartender and his uncle who helps her on her journey of discovery.

This is a delightful, through-provoking, satisfying story. It was refreshing to see in Fran a woman of a certain age who wasn’t a senile, toothless, doddering old lady in a wheelchair but rather an energetic, enervated woman with a little bit of a libido. The surroundings are so authentically described it feels as if you are there. Thanks to Harper Collins UK One More Chapter for providing an advance copy of The Collaborator’s Daughter for my reading pleasure and honest opinion. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it without hesitation; all opinions are my own. ( )