In Between, novel (Između, Disput, Croatia, 2022) 

This novel is about the migrant experience of a young married couple from Zagreb in the English industrial city of Birmingham from 2011 to 2022. Marko, an incomplete student of economics, who leaves Croatia to pay off his loan in Swiss Francs, finds work as a construction worker, and Sandra soon joins him, carried away by dreams of drinking tea and the English lifestyle. Reality is entirely different because she cannot follow her profession as a teacher. Sandra accepts a position at the bus station counter. The novel follows their emotional and practical life between Birmingham and Zagreb, the dilemma of staying or returning, their struggle to fit into the British way of life, and the increasingly strong realization that Zagreb is becoming a foreign city to them. In this splitting and dissolution of identity, Marko and Sandra change as people; even their official status in the two countries changes, and their relationship undergoes many trials. The author asks how the same person can be an emigrant in one’s own country and an immigrant in another’s and how these terms allow us to quickly pigeonhole people without even listening to their stories.

IZMEĐU – Disput