What if the history of a nation isn’t written in constitutions, speeches, wars, and borders, but in a single glass?

The book ('Brotherhood and Slivovitz') tells the story of Yugoslavia and its aftermath through one unlikely protagonist: a strong, clear drink that has accompanied celebrations, negotiations, breakdowns, and everyday life alike. Here, slivovitz is not a detail, but the main character — a liquid witness to a century of unity, fracture, memory, and forgetting.

Drawing on newspapers, archives, literature, advertisements, labels, anecdotes, and fragments of daily life, the author traces a world where drinking is never just drinking. Slivovitz becomes a language of belonging, a gesture of trust, a tool of persuasion, and, at times, a quiet trigger of history itself.

Sharp, witty, and uncomfortably precise, this is a story told from an unexpected angle — from inside the glass. For readers interested in history, culture, the Balkans, and everything that official narratives tend to overlook, ignore, or quietly leave under the table. Because if you want to understand a nation, it helps to see what it pours.