For a long time I didn’t know much about my father’s family history. Any details I had gleaned made it sound mercurial. Tempers flared the night before his grandfather’s wedding, for example, and two of the party were shot dead, but the nuptials still took place the next morning. I sensed it always moving, national identity was always shifting; the places they came from in Yugoslavia were constantly renamed and redrawn. I saw images on the news as a child and it seemed better to look away.

The first time I went there, we buried my grandfather Misa in Petrovac. It was 1997 and the Bosnian war had just ended. The supermarket shelves were thick with dust. A kind, elderly woman with no English, charged with looking after me while the adults arranged the funeral, made me spaghetti with a single streak of oil. I was befriended by a gang of children who’d learned English from films. I played with them beside the empty beach and on my last night one boy wrote me a love letter, making good use of a dictionary. It was delivered with a crystal from a glass chandelier, addressed “Dear Lydia”, begging me not to leave. “THIS IS YOUR HOME NOW,” he wrote in vaguely threatening bubble script.

I went back to Serbia and Montenegro several times in the intervening years, but it was only when I began writing that I started asking questions. Just as I began work on a novel partly set in Sarajevo, I found a yellowing paperback called Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat on my shelves. I had no idea my grandmother, who died when I was 18, became a published author in 1963. On opening the book, I found a shaky handwritten dedication to me: “To my granddaughter, hoping she will learn some Serbo-Croat”, dated my 11th birthday. Even by that time, the language had ceased to exist.

My grandmother called me Katarina, never Olivia. At the time I thought this was outrageous, but have begun to understand

Though I spent so long anglicising my surname, hoping my heritage wouldn’t come up, Yugoslavia has found its way into much of my writing. For my next book I’ve been thinking a lot about Misa. He’d had a stroke when I was very young so it had been difficult to communicate other than looks and holding hands.He was born in 1912. His parents had migrated to Bisbee, then a copper-mining town in Arizona, a few years before. After his father’s death, Misa and his mother came back to Petrovac in what was then still Austria-Hungary but became Yugoslavia in 1918. He became a communist and met my grandmother, also a member of the party but from Belgrade. As students they were both arrested during a riot at Belgrade University for smashing up Nazi-funded labs.

My grandmother got a scholarship to study at Edinburgh University just before the outbreak of the second world war. Misa went with her and then the Communist party suggested they spend the war in London. In 1946 they returned to Yugoslavia, this time with my two uncles in tow. Private property had been nationalised and a policeman billeted to live in the Petrovac home.

Misa prospered, but, according to my grandparents, non-party people went hungry. They decided to return to the UK, where my father was born. It was a continuous struggle without citizenship. Misa found himself selling nonstick frying pans at fairgrounds. My grandmother got jobs teaching and translating Serbo-Croat and in the Harrods homeware department. When his British passport came through, Misa got a job with a travel company taking tourists to Yugoslavia.

‘Bread is practically sacred’: how the taste of home sustained my refugee parents Read more

He moved back to Sveti Stefan, the next coastal town along from Petrovac, where he worked in a hotel surrounded by the Adriatic but became an alcoholic and was hospitalised. My uncle brought him back to Scotland. He recovered enough to get a job as a security guard in a Kirkaldy shopping centre. Just in time. It wasn’t long before Yugoslavia collapsed. I didn’t know any of this when I went to his funeral. I do remember that my grandmother called me Katarina, never Olivia, even though it was my (concessionary) Slavic middle name. At the time I thought this was outrageous, but have begun to understand.

The last time I visited the region I went to Sarajevo. I hadn’t expected the experience of being there to feel so shattering, reading personal testimony, seeing shelled buildings and the mouth of the escape tunnel. Every day I went to the War Childhood museum, an initiative set up by a man exactly my age but who grew up in the siege. Studying the exhibits – personal items donated by those who were children during the conflict – I was struck not only by the horror, but by how familiar their parallel lives seemed. One letter in particular stopped me in my tracks. That bubble script.

• This article was amended on 25 September 2019 to make it clear that the reference to “non-party people went hungry” was based on the recollection of the author’s grandparents.

• Olivia Sudjic is a novelist