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Shades of ‘Buttoners’, ‘Short Cuts’ and other portmanteau pieces: Ogresta’s six loosely interwoven stories set in present-day Croatia record the aftershocks of the Balkan conflict with steady care. Characters from the first, timed at the tail-end of the fighting, recur later: the middle-aged group leader as a taciturn insomniac, the handsome soldier as a handsome drifter. Other characters include an old bachelor tricked into accepting a date with a young woman, a boozed-up TV celebrity on a dark night of the soul and a young female junkie raging for a hit. As a group, they strike a fair balance between despair and hope, cruelty and kindness, though there’s a bitter irony to the fade-out on the Croatian national anthem.