Marina Warner writes:

Baba Yaga is the true Witch of the North, the supreme scare figure of the Russian nursery, a monstrous old hag who haunts children and eats them. She doesn’t exactly appear in character here, but she hovers off stage, and directs the action. Old women are Ugrešić's heroines and old womanhood her theme. This new book is a hybrid work, a comic fable in three parts, combining autobiography, travel, memoir, fable, satire and essay. It begins with an elegy about her own mother’s decline into dementia; hoping to reawaken her mother’s memories, Ugrešić makes a pilgrimage to Sofia, her mother’s hometown, seeing herself as a bedel (the double who rich men used to pay to go to Mecca or fight in the army in their stead). But when she returns with photographs and anecdotes, her mother doesn’t recognise present-day Sofia. This is Ugrešić’s territory: the impossibility of belonging, the ineluctability of loss and the desirability, even so, of remaining apart.

(LRB 16 August 2009)

Canongate’s fabulous ‘Myths’ series enlists great writers from around the world to recast ancient myths and stories into a modern form. Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić uses the Slavic folk-villainess Baba Yaga, a witch who lives in a house mounted on gigantic chicken legs and who travels the world in a mortar and pestle kidnapping small children, as a starting point for a profound and startling meditation on the themes of femininity and ageing.

Canongate | hardback 327 pp. |ISBN: 9781847670663