Cancer victim's memoirs.

Byline: By Katherine Haddon

Chernobyl Strawberries, by Vesna Goldsworthy, Atlantic Books, pounds 14.99 hardback.

After being diagnosed with breast cancer, Vesna Goldsworthy wrote this memoir as a record of her life for her young son.

She grew up in a middle-class home in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, under Tito.

A bookish teenager, she dated sports captains, smoked illicit cigarettes and was obsessed by Dr Zhivago. After flirting with Communism, Goldsworthy left her homeland in the mid-1980s to marry an Englishman.

She watched on TV as Nato bombs fell on Belgrade during the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Shortly afterwards, she was diagnosed with cancer.

The book focuses on Goldsworthy's efforts to reconcile her roots with a new life in a foreign country ( a Balkan past in the British present. "I had become English in every possible way, but the fault lines along which the pain reached me were still Serbian," she writes of her reaction to the conflict.

Tellingly, when she is recovering from her cancer operation in a London hospital, her morphine dreams take her back to the Belgrade basketball courts of her youth.

One particularly strong, though mysterious, image comes in the title of the work.

She suggests that the possibly radioactive strawberries watered by clouds from Chernobyl which she ate as a teenager may have contributed to her cancer.

But although these fruits are "the colour of fresh wounds and as warm as live blood", she associates their smell with "the kind of love that makes the oceans part".

There is much poetic, honest and unsentimental writing in this memoir, which unexpectedly succeeds in weaving a series of apparently unconnected memories into a story which dips, soars and moves.