A beautiful reminiscence on the places of our youth and the indelible marks they leave on our souls.

Since childhood, Tony Fabijancic has traveled frequently to Yugoslavia and Croatia, his father’s homeland. He spent time with his family in the northern village of Srebrnjak and occasionally escaped to the Adriatic islands in the south. Those two worlds—the north, marked by the haunting saga and history of family life, and the south, defined by travel and escape—formed the two halves of Fabijancic’s Croatian life. Over time, he watched Srebrnjak become a white-collar weekend retreat, the peasant community of the 1970s that he knew in his youth now a distant memory.

From the continental inland of green valleys and plum orchards to the austere, skeletal coast, Drink in the Summer is a unique record of a place and people now lost to time, a description of a country’s varied landscapes, and a journey of discovery, freedom, beauty, and love.