In response to the growing demand for intellectual property (IP) and the interest from regional and international professionals in adaptations, CineLink launches new programme section, CineLink Books. CineLink Books will introduce a special presentation session, where selected novels from the region of the Former Yugoslavia will be pitched to internationally and regionally established producers. With a deliberate focus on fostering connections between literature and the film industry by showcasing books from publishers holding IPs. This year, CineLink Books will present six books, featuring two publishers each from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia, aiming to foster discussions on adaptations and enhance the visibility of the regional publishing market.
After Party
Stevo Grabovac, Imprimatur, Bosnia and Herzegovina
A gripping journey begins when our protagonist is drawn into a forgotten chapter of Bosnia and Herzegovina's wartime history. A phone call from the Wartime Association for Missing Persons reopens his late father's archives, which document war crimes from 1992 to 1995. This call thrusts him into a disturbing mystery involving the disappearance of twenty Roma children and rumors of organ trafficking. As he investigates, he faces his own past — childhood friendships destroyed by conflict — and seeks justice. Reconnecting with his former best friend, Damir, now terminally ill, he navigates deception while grappling with regrets and others' sins. The story presents a profound moral dilemma: Is seeking vengeance ever justified, even against undeniable evil? Structured in five parts, After Party explores fathers and sons, lost innocence, unspeakable crimes, and storytelling itself. It offers a tempestuous exploration of autofiction, memory, and human fragility.
STEVO GRABOVAC was born on November 9, 1978, in Slavonski Brod. In 2007, he published a collection of poems titled Non-existent Train Stations. His debut novel, Mulatto Albino Mosquito (2019), was shortlisted for the NIN Award. His second novel, After-party, won the NIN Award for Best Novel of 2023 and the Vladan Desnica Award, presented by the National Library of Serbia. After-party is currently shortlisted for the Meša Selimović Award. Stevo Grabovac lives and works in Banja Luka.
Come Across
Nenad Rizvanović, Naklada Ljevak, Croatia
The novel Come Across (2023) is divided into six units in which Osijek's real and alternative history overlap, with the narrated time covering the period from the late sixties to the late eighties of the 20th century. The narrator tells the story of his mother's girlhood, her immersion in the city's life in the early sixties, her meeting with her future husband, and the narrator's birth. The narrator's family lives in an optimistic and fun, but provincial town; they buy different types of cars, visit unusual relatives, and live ordinary lives, which the narrator tells of in the mode of magical realism. Popular music and film are an important part of the narrator's adolescence, as well as walking around the city and fantasizing about Osijek's real and alternative history, which, among other things, includes Frank Sinatra's imaginary visit to Osijek's Hotel Royal in the year of the narrator's birth.
NENAD RIZVANOVIĆ (1968) is a writer and literary editor, artistic director of the Slovo Gorčina literary festival in Stolac (Bosnia and Herzegovina), a member of juries for literary awards, and a long-time literary critic. He graduated in Croatian language and literature and South Slavic philology at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb, Croatia. He completed his PhD at the University of Zadar, Croatia, on Croatian publishing history. He has published literary criticism and prose in newspapers and magazines since 1985. He edited several newspapers and magazines and led the Literary Forum Književni petak in Zagreb (1997–2001). He has been working in publishing as an editor since 2001. The novel Come Across is the author's fifth novel and his tenth book of fiction. Rizvanović's literary oeuvre, which includes novels, short stories, essays, and poems, is largely thematically marked by his native Osijek.
Dogs
Dora Šustić, Fraktura, Croatia
When she enrolls in the prestigious Film Academy in Prague, the unnamed protagonist hopes to get everything she desires from life – “knowledge, freedom, sex, a job, success, love, and money.” Golden Prague is the city of her dreams but also the place where she will face all of life's challenges. At a party, she meets an older charismatic photographer, falls in love, and surrenders to passion, unaware of how powerful his dark energy is. While he is her first great love, she is, for him, a reminder of his late wife, an Andalusian woman he loved endlessly. Dogs is a novel about the millennial generation yearning for freedom, raised to believe that everything is possible until the harshness of liberal capitalism reduces them to precarious work with no room for youthful ideals. The girls and women in Dora Šustić's powerful generational novel are ready to break male dominance and misogyny despite the traps of unhappy loves and the deaths that surround them. Even when they are aware they are racing towards their downfall, all the characters cannot give up their passions, for without them, there is no life.
DORA ŠUSTIĆ, a writer, screenwriter, and film director, was born in 1991 in Rijeka. She graduated in screenwriting from FAMU in Prague. She has lived in Istanbul, Berlin, Ljubljana, and Zagreb, where she works as a screenwriter and develops her own film and literary projects. Her debut novel Dogs, awarded the Drago Gervais Prize for the best unpublished manuscript under the title Praznina, is her first published work.
Jellyfish Live Forever Until They Are Caught
Nađa Petrović, Geopoetika, Serbia
It’s the start of what should be the most carefree time of Sara’s life, the summer between high school and college. She goes out with her friends to alternative clubs, tries to make up with her ex-boyfriend Viktor, drinks excessively, and wants to be noticed even though she is actually shy. Everything changes after Sara experiences a vision in a dark room of a club, which reminds her of the trauma she thought she had successfully repressed. She wakes up the next morning with a tingling in her arm. It spreads, and Sara discovers she has an unnamed disease, which she will live with normally, but it will follow her forever. Panicked, Sara begins to fear death and matures rapidly. During her prep course to become a painter, she meets Tisa and Balša. The two are eccentric, have both faced death in the past, and have buried traumas. Through her relationship with them, Sara faces her present, future, and past – a family tragedy that marked her entire upbringing.
NAĐA PETROVIĆ (1997) graduated in dramaturgy from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade and also completed a master's degree in film and TV directing at the same faculty. At the age of sixteen, she won the Young Literary Supertalents competition when her novel That’s It (2015) was published. Her novel Jellyfish Live Forever Until They Are Caught (2023) was shortlisted for the NIN Award, the Belgrade Winner Award, and the Vladan Desnica Award. Dozens of short films she wrote have been screened at over 100 festivals worldwide and have won awards at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Les Arcs Festival in France, Beldocs Film Festival, and the Best Screenplay Award at Bašta Fest. The short film she directed, SMELL OF FRESH PAINT (2024), will have its premiere at this year's Sarajevo Film Festival. She is one of the screenwriters of the series ABSOLUTE HUNDRED by Srđan Golubović and Ivan Knežević. She is also the co-writer of the films WHITE WEEK directed by Bojan Vuletić, SEABOUND directed by Senka Domanović, and the new feature film by Srđan Golubović, BODIES, all currently in pre-production.
Nobody Is Forgotten And Nothing Is Remembered
Mirjana Drljević, Booka, Serbia
Three seventeen-year-old girls lie naked in Belgrade's Republic Square on May 9th – Victory Day over Fascism – as part of a bizarre performance. Six days earlier, Inspector Lepa Vidić receives the case of the abducted girls: Čarna, Minja, and Ana. Their mothers – Marta, Katarina, and Danica – grew up together in a New Belgrade military housing complex. Lepa, with her son and sidekick Fedor, who is wheelchair-bound, leads the investigation down two paths. One is procedural: interviews with witnesses and potential suspects, searching for the vehicle used in the abduction, and tracking down accomplices. The other unravels the shared childhood, friendships, and loves of the mothers and three men: Brka, the local restaurant owner; Saša, everyone’s best friend; and Ognjen, Čarna’s father who doesn't know it. There’s also Jakov, Marta’s assistant at her greenhouse. Lepa's almost supernatural ability to read people helps uncover secrets every character hides.
MIRJANA DRLJEVIĆ is a Serbian writer and creative director born in 1971 in Belgrade. She studied dramaturgy at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts. Her notable works include plays San o Svetom Petru Cetinjskom, performed by the Montenegrin National Theatre, and Sunflowers, performed by Sterija Theatre in Vršac. Her novel Nobody is Forgotten and Nothing is Remembered won a competition by the publishing house Booka in 2022 and was shortlisted for the NIN Award and the regional Meša Selimović Award. Her short story My Father won the regional Ulaznica competition for prose work in 2022. She lives, works, reads, and writes in Belgrade.
That’s Me
Damir Uzunović, Buybook, Bosnia and Herzegovina
The novel consists of three stylistically different but interconnected books: Korea (The Book of Pain), The Maniac in the Attic Next Door (The Book of Sex), and My Father's Three Deaths (The Book of Grief). It is a combination of autobiographical fiction and a literary tribute to the author's father, mother, and native Sarajevo. The story takes place within an urban family of Bosnian Muslim provenance, from its emergence in the Sarajevo district known as Korea (in the 1950s and 1960s in socialist Yugoslavia) to its dissolution (early 21st century), with the onset of the long post-war period, the death of the author's father, and the numerous attempts of the protagonist/author to abandon his family and the war-destroyed city. In a novel with more than 500 unique and authentic characters, the author's identity is formed, destroyed, rises, and falls through situations involving all the characters. This represents the author's key strategic and narrative procedure, making it a story of more than 500 statements of That's Me, more than 500 selfhoods.
DAMIR UZUNOVIĆ was born in 1965 in Sarajevo. So far, he has published three books of poetry: The Boat With a Talisman (1992), Magician (1995), and Men and Birds (2005); a book of short stories, Chestnut (1999; Prize of the Open Society Foundation BiH); and the novel That’s Me (A novel in three books) (2021), for which he received the most significant award in Croatia - the FRIC award for the best book of fiction published in 2021, and the award of the Society of Writers of BiH for 2021. It was included in the Bosnian prose anthology Under Pressure, and the poetry anthologies Here Lives Konan, Why Is Venice Sinking, and Great Book of Lyrical Poetry of BiH, Montenegro, Croatia, and Serbia From The Beginning To The Present Day. His poems and stories have been translated into several languages, and the audio version of the novel That’s Me is available in the Library for the Blind and Visually Impaired. He is the director and co-founder of the Sarajevo bookstore and publishing house Buybook, and the program director of the International Literature Festival Bookstan. He works as an editor at the publishing house Buybook in Sarajevo.