The Event of my Demise

Oceanmore, 2023, 280 pp.

Translation rights sold: Slovenia (Beletrina), Montenegro (Nova Knjiga), Macedonia (Perun Artis)

Option publisher: Amazon Crossing (excl. Germany), Norway (Cappelen Damm), Serbia (Raši), Macedonia (Goten Publishing), Bulgaria (Paradox), Hungary (Metropolis Kiado), France (Les Argonautes), Poland (Pogranicze)

Option publisher Audio: StoryTel
Option publisher Film/TV: Antitalent

When a gun fires in the first act, the small-town talented contemporary setting – Novak’s specialty – becomes a stage of archetypal conflicts: individual versus the system, morality versus the law, principles versus the corruption.

Nenad Fegeš, a young roads policeman was found dead at the backseat of his car. The case was ruled a suicide, but his family refuses to believe it. There are too many discrepancies in the story, the police never did the autopsy, fuelling the suspicion of an inside job. Nenad’s older brother, a policeman himself, is burdened with a heavy task of uncovering the truth and punishing the ones responsible. But what if the ones responsible are the same ones who are in power? At the same time, a young, ambitious drama teacher is staging a high school production of Antigone. She wants her students to express raw emotion, pushing them to face their own darkness: how else will they create real magic on the stage? In that, she makes a fatal mistake. She brings up the policeman’s death, convinced his demise was a consequence of him standing up to local sheriffs, but not all her students see it that way. While she sets on a quest to prove the truth and to save her dignity and her job, her seemingly perfect, comfortable life starts falling apart, revealing underneath all that fearlessness she did not know she possessed. A few authors can do what he does so effortlessly: by using a smartly constructed crime plot as an engine that drives a story, he paints a painfully faithful picture of a society, breaking the fourth wall of illusions upon which its structure is built.

“There are no words to convince you that The Event of my Demise is something you should not miss. It's so much better, deeper, heavier and more emotional than anything I could say. And although I like to think that I know words and that they are my domain, this novel exceeds all praise and recommendation.“

Mala od knjige

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