Excerpted from the Amazon bestselling collection, Never a From her past in Croatia and Russia, to finding a son in Bhutan, to befriending women in Africa, one woman's stories of travel, connection, and self-discovery A trip to the heart of Russia From the author of Mother A Saga of Three Generations of Balkan Women Although fluent in Russian, I have traveled to my homeland only once in my life, in the depressive years of the Soviet Union's Communist existence. That trip, in 1977, was occasioned by my position as an executive of a supercomputer company whose products were highly desired by the Soviets. As a result, I was allowed to travel to an area closed to tourists, the remote spot where my father was born before the revolution of 1917. This is the story of that trip into the heart of Russia.

It was the spring of 2014. My brother Sasha and I were spending a month roaming around the beautiful peninsula of Istria, in Croatia, where our mother was born. Friends at home in San Francisco raved about Croatia as a tourist destination. For me, Croatia was the place of disasters that started long before I was born, swept me and my family up, and caused our expulsion—which had continued until just a few years earlier. Could the tide have turned? I wanted to know. I wanted to go beneath the surface to learn what was happening in the countries of the former Yugoslavia, with which my family had such deep roots. This is the story of our time in Croatia, of conversations with and unique insights gained from interactions with the locals. Not everything, we learned, was quite as it seemed.