SOURCE: Hughes, Lindsey. “Out of Grandmother's Store Cupboard.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4635 (31 January 1992): 23.

In the following review, Hughes discusses Holograms of Fear in context of Drakulic's essays in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.

Images of death and decay haunt Holograms of Fear, a novel which focuses on a woman's thoughts before and after a kidney transplant operation in a hospital outside New York. The operation goes well, so why is she afraid? Why does the word “recovery” always appear in inverted commas? The answer emerges through flashbacks to the patient's home in Zagreb, to memories, tender and guilt-ridden, of her grandmother, mother and daughter, and of her own younger self growing up in post-war Yugoslavia, of fellow dialysis patients, including her father, and a woman friend who commits suicide, her indecisiveness embodied in a bowl of underwear left to soak overnight. The narrative shifts between countries...