ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sheyla Babic
Hello, I'm Sheyla.
I've always been interested in people, places, and the small details of everyday life that are easy to miss when they become familiar. Perhaps that comes from moving so much.
Throughout my childhood and young adulthood, I moved many times. With every move came another goodbye, another beginning, another place where everyone else seemed to know how things worked while I had to learn it all again.
I became used to being the new person-arriving, observing, listening, learning the unwritten rules, and slowly finding my place.
There is something strange about moving often. You become good at starting again, but you also begin to wonder what makes somewhere truly yours. Is home the place you were born? The place you stayed the longest? The people you love? Or simply the place where, one day, you realise you no longer feel like a visitor?
Every new home had its own rhythm. Things that seemed completely ordinary to the people living there could feel fascinating, confusing, or wonderfully strange to someone seeing them for the first time.
Years later, when I arrived in Mallorca with my family, I recognised that feeling immediately.
Only this time, I started writing things down.
I noticed the conversations, the traditions, the routines, the characters, the church bells, the long coffees, the fiestas, and all those little moments of village life that don't seem particularly important until you stop and really look at them.
And somewhere along the way, Mallorca Unplugged began.
“Perhaps belonging begins when a place stops feeling like somewhere you arrived, and simply becomes where you are.”
How Mallorca Unplugged Began
Perhaps this story began long before Mallorca.
Moving from place to place taught me something about being an outsider: you notice things.
You watch before you understand. You ask questions other people stopped asking years ago. You learn how to enter worlds that existed perfectly well before you arrived. And sometimes, just when a place begins to feel familiar, life asks you to begin again somewhere else.
Over time, I realised that being an outsider wasn't only about not belonging. It also gave me a particular way of seeing. When nothing is familiar, almost nothing is invisible.
When I made my home in Búger, a small village in Mallorca, I found myself doing exactly that again. I watched. I listened. I became curious. And then I imagined four visitors who were even more unfamiliar with this world than I was.
They arrive intending to observe human life rationally and efficiently. Instead, they encounter neighbours, traditions, sheep, long conversations, unnecessary celebrations, affection, arguments, coffee-and an entire village that refuses to behave as efficiently as expected.
Through them, I could look at ordinary life as though I were seeing it for the first time. But somewhere between observing my new home and writing about four outsiders trying to understand it, I realised I was writing about something much more familiar to me. Arriving. Watching. Trying to understand. And, eventually, hoping to belong.
It was a story that had quietly followed me through many places, many goodbyes, and many new beginnings.
And perhaps the question at the heart of the book had been following me too:
What does it mean to arrive somewhere-and when does that place finally become home?
Mallorca Unplugged: Finding Belonging is my debut novel.
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Author of Mallorca Unplugged: Finding Belonging