Lidija Hilje Slanting Towards the Sea

Annotation

While we were together, Vlaho and I joked that we had more anniversaries than Croatia had islands. Ivona and Vlaho meet as students at the turn of the millennium in Zagreb. Everything smells of freedom and possibility. Red Hot Chili Peppers are pumping through the speakers of a bar in the city centre and cheap beer is overflowing; newly democratic Croatia is alive with hope and promise. They fall in love instantly. A decade later, Ivona has returned to her childhood home in Zadar to look after her ailing father. She and Vlaho are divorced, yet she finds herself welcomed into his family life by him and his wife. But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the trio’s carefully curated dynamic is disturbed, forcing a reckoning for all involved. Slanting Towards the Sea explores what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself, as it sets a sensual, decades-long love story against the wild beauty of an emerging Croatia. From the cobbled alleyways of Cavtat, a small town near Dubrovnik, to the rugged, glimmering coastline of Zadar, and the bustling streets of Zagreb in the early 2000s, this is a story of longing, buried resentment and claiming a life of your own.