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What to Listen to When Travelling to Croatia

When travelling, we often rely on playlists or podcasts to fill the silence between destinations. But what if your headphones could offer something more immersive, not just background noise, but a way into the soul of the place you’re in?

With the growing library of Croatian audiobooks in English and a selection of pure field recordings from the country's most striking natural settings, book&zvook, Croatia’s first digital audiobook platform, invites travellers to experience the country through its voices, its literature, and its soundscapes.

Whether you're strolling through stone alleys, stuck in ferry queues, or watching the horizon from a car window, here’s what to listen to while Croatia unfolds around you.

What to Listen to When Travelling to Croatia

Voices, landscapes, and stories you can take with you.

 

written by: book&zvook

 

When travelling, we often rely on playlists or podcasts to fill the silence between destinations. But what if your headphones could offer something more immersive, not just background noise, but a way into the soul of the place you’re in?

With the growing library of Croatian audiobooks in English and a selection of pure field recordings from the country's most striking natural settings, book&zvook, Croatia’s first digital audiobook platform, invites travellers to experience the country through its voices, its literature, and its soundscapes.

Whether you're strolling through stone alleys, stuck in ferry queues, or watching the horizon from a car window, here’s what to listen to while Croatia unfolds around you.

Stories that Travel Well: Croatian Audiobooks in English

You don’t need a guidebook to understand where you are. Sometimes, fiction does it better.

 

A Cat at the End of the World by Robert Perišić

There’s a rare kind of narrative that speaks in multiple directions at once, to myth and to memory, to contemporary political unease and to pre-philosophical instinct. Robert Perišić’s novel does exactly that, staging an escape from the order of a collapsing empire through the eyes of a slave boy, a misbehaving Egyptian cat, and a philosophical donkey. A fourth voice, that of the Scatterwind, or perhaps time itself, overlays the story with a commentary that is at once intimate and panoramic.
This is no allegory in the strict sense, and no costume drama either. It is a novel written with the rhythm of fable and the ethical tension of late realism. In its gentle undoing of human primacy, Perišić offers not a critique, but a quiet realignment: what if freedom begins not with rebellion, but with noticing what and who the world has left out?

Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape by Predrag Matvejević

Matvejević’s Mediterranean is neither a place nor a border but a palimpsest of histories, tongues, ruins, and recipes. Originally written in the late 1980s but timeless in scope, this is not a travel guide but a meditation, learned, lyrical, and restlessly associative. He moves across coasts and centuries like a monk gathering fragments: obscure maps, lost customs, port gossip, peasant proverbs, and Byzantine echoes.
Listening to Matvejević is like overhearing the sea think. This is cultural geography as literature, and literature as moral cartography. Ideal for readers who travel to deepen rather than escape, and who prefer salt to sugar in their intellectual diet.

Celebration by Damir Karakaš

Karakaš writes with the economy of someone who distrusts excess. Celebration is a compact novel with the density of a confession and the chill of a parable. Set deep in the woods, in a raw and remote rural region shaped by violence, superstition, and dread, the story follows a young man returning to his village in the wake of war, carrying silence like a wound. Karakaš never raises his voice, and that restraint is his sharpest tool. The narration is stark, the emotional charge relentless. Beneath the minimalism lies a deep excavation of masculinity, trauma, and the dark poetry of survival. A haunting listen.

Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović

This collection of stories is both a sly diagnosis and a covert protest. Kolanović writes from within a society addicted to late-capitalist spectacle and post-transition paradox, yet her voice is never cynical. The stories oscillate between the hyperreal and the melancholically absurd: shopping mall flâneurs, wounded girlhoods, ghostly consumer objects.
Her language shimmers with irony and pain, even when it smiles. "Underground Barbie" reads like the subconscious of a country that knows exactly what has been sold, and who paid for it. Short enough for transit listening, rich enough to replay.

Farewell, Cowboy by Olja Savičević Ivančević

A punk western in sandals. This novel sets its plot in a sun-bleached, half-abandoned coastal town and wraps grief in sarcasm, gender critique in narrative tightropes, and regional specificity in universal ache. The narrator, a fierce woman in search of the truth behind her brother’s death, cuts through the dust of the past with a blade that’s both sharp and glittering.
Savičević Ivančević writes with a voice that is unapologetically local, yet disarmingly translatable. If you like your fiction sunburned, seductive, and smarter than it pretends to be, this is your Croatian summer noir.

Call Me Esteban by Lejla Kalamujić

Fragmentary, intimate, and luminous with emotional precision, Kalamujić’s autofictional narrative orbits themes of grief, queerness, illness, and the body’s fragility. Yet nothing here is heavy-handed. The language is lean, the structure elliptical, and the effect cumulative.
This is not a linear memoir but a constellation of losses and survivals. Listening to it feels like stepping into someone’s carefully curated silence. The result is as political as it is personal: a refusal to simplify what identity feels like from the inside.

Unterstadt by Ivana Šojat

A multi-generational family saga set in Osijek, "Unterstadt" reveals the sedimented traumas of 20th-century Central Europe through a woman's voice both haunted and defiant. The novel refuses to be brief, and rightly so: it deals in what is repressed, buried, denied.
Its structure is symphonic, its historical grasp precise, its emotional reach devastating. In audiobook form, the text gains a kind of choral intensity. Listening becomes an act of both witnessing and reckoning. Not light summer fare, but essential.

Water, Spiderweb by Nada Gašić

Gašić writes like someone who has watched silence grow limbs. In this quiet but fierce novel, the lives of several women converge around a family house and a set of absences too dense to name. Memory is not linear here, nor is love, nor time.
There’s a kind of feminist mysticism at work, though never declared. Listening to this novel feels like entering a room you used to know, only to find that the light now falls differently. Recommended for listeners who appreciate emotional slow burns.

A Journey to Russia by Miroslav Krleža

This is not a journey, but an excavation. Written in the 1920s by one of Yugoslavia’s sharpest literary minds, Krleža’s account of Soviet Russia is both critique and performance. His prose crackles with suspicion, fascination, and that peculiar arrogance reserved for writers who sense they are smarter than history itself. It is also, uncannily, a book about now: about systems, mythologies, and what we choose to ignore. Hearing Krleža read aloud today feels like listening to a letter sent to the future, which somehow arrived.

Sarajevo Marlboro by Miljenko Jergović

Every city has its ghosts, but Sarajevo has a choir. Jergović’s landmark collection of wartime stories gives voice to the ordinary lives fractured by siege, not with sentiment, but with luminous specificity. The tone is patient, the images quietly annihilating.
These are short stories that don’t announce themselves. They settle in slowly and leave sediment. A rare case where listening deepens the wound, and somehow, also the care.

Soundscapes: Listening Without Words

In a country so often reduced to visuals - sea, stone and sun - these field recordings offer something radical: the act of hearing place without narration. In "From Drop to Waterfall," the acoustic arc of Plitvice Lakes is rendered from trickle to roar. "Symphony of the Adriatic" dives into maritime frequencies: waves, wind, underwater hush. "The Last Oasis" captures Kopački rit at dawn, teeming and still.

Together, they form a triptych of Croatian presence before language. For moments when you don’t want to be guided, just enveloped.

📲 How to Listen

All titles are available on the book&zvook mobile app (iOS & Android). To listen:

1. Download the app
2. Register with an email address
3. Search for ‘Titles in English’
4. Put on your headphones and Listen to Croatia

Croatia is full of visual marvels, but there’s a richness in its literature and sounds that photos can’t capture. This summer, don’t just see the country. Hear it.

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