A Briton first attracted to Slovenia by a 300-year-old sausage-curing cabin before spending a decade visiting and five years living here has packed his adventures and insights about the country in a captivating travel memoir titled Dormice & Moonshine.

Dreaming of a little cabin somewhere up high where the snow fell deep to call their own, Sam Baldwin and his brother discovered Hrib, a former sausage-curing hut up in the Koroška region in the north. It was love at first sight.

They soon realised that a 300-year-old cabin comes with 300 problems. Yet against all the odds and advice of his family, Sam holds onto it, spending the next ten years visiting the country to rebuild the house.

Becoming more and more enamoured with Slovenia's natural splendours, the mountains, the verdant meadows, the forests, and the people, and following a breakup he decides to stay, adopting Ljubljana as his new home with Hrib as his vikend (weekend/holiday home).

Along the way Sam meets a colourful cross-section of Slovenian society and expat community, where not everyone always shares his enthusiasm about the country.

He meets dormouse hunters, beekeepers and the man who swam the Amazon, learns how to make moonshine and butcher your own meat, but also gets to work with bitcoin miners, and earns rare praise from a hilltop matriarch for being priden (good or hard-working).

Sam Baldwin, the author of the book Dormice & Moonshine . Photo: Courtesy of Sam Baldwin

The book follows Sam's struggles with the complexity of Slovenian grammar, as well as his first-hand experience of the less pretty sides of Slovenia, the unhelpful bureaucrats and the "national sport of neighbour fighting".

With that experience, as well as those of climbing Mount Triglav, spending a beach holiday in Croatia and being looked down upon as a Yugo in Austria, he almost fits a stereotype of what it is to be a true Slovenian.

Yet, when it comes to the matters of the heart he has a tough choice to make, when he has to decide whether to join a Carinthian Slovenian he met at a Slovenian language course for a new life across the border.

Sam says he has written his "love letter" to Slovenia because there are not many books written in English about Slovenia, a country he describes as underrated and painfully beautiful, and one about which there are many misconceptions in the West.

Indeed, full of quirky characters, anecdotes and interesting facts about the country, it is an insightful and enjoyable read both for foreigners wanting to learn more about Slovenia and for the locals wanting to learn more about themselves.

An author with experience in copywriting, internet marketing and startup growth but originally trained as a pharmacologist, Sam had lived in several other countries before moving to Slovenia, including spending two years as a teacher of English in rural Japan, writing about his experiences in For Fukui's Sake.

He is also a designer, having his own brand of unique Slovenia-themed T-shirts and other products. Rather than overused symbols of dragons and hearts, his BREG designs combine iconic elements of Slovenian landscape, language, culture and cuisine in an original way. A tinned olm is just one of them.