We Are Born with a Homing Beacon

Vesna Jaksic Lowe interviews Croatian author Lidija Hilje about her debut novel, “Slanting Towards the Sea.”

By Vesna Jaksic LoweAugust 25, 2025

• Fiction

LIDIJA HILJE LOST two jobs as a lawyer in Croatia after taking maternity leave to have children. She started her own law firm, but business in her small coastal city of Zadar was slow, so she wrote on the side. Croatia is a small country with an even smaller publishing industry, so after penning a book in her native Croatian, she translated it into English to try to publish it in the United States. But she got more than 100 rejections in the agent querying process. Hilje decided to write her next book in English. On her second query, she landed an agent and sold the manuscript to a major publisher—a rarity for even US-based debut authors.

Set in Hilje’s hometown of Zadar, Slanting Towards the Sea (2025) explores a long-divorced couple’s relationship, grappling with issues of love, longing, resentment, and grief. It questions what we sacrifice for ourselves and our loved ones for the sake of happiness, and what constitutes sacrifice. The novel centers on Ivona, a Croatian woman trying to carve her path in a country younger than her, a place known for its stunning natural beauty and bristling bureaucratic obstacles.

As a writer who grew up in Croatia, I was transported by the story to my home country—an enthralling seaside setting, like the one I grew up in; a dad who sails six months a year, like mine did; and familiar monikers like Marina, my niece’s name. I appreciated the complexities and layers, and the expectation-defying characters and relationships.

I spoke with Hilje over Zoom, days before the US and UK launch of her book. This interview was edited for length and clarity.

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VESNA JAKSIC LOWE: We talked about how you wrote Slanting Towards the Sea in English, which is your second language. Were you translating in your head, or thinking in English as you wrote?

LIDIJA HILJE: When I started writing Slanting Towards the Sea, I was writing in English as the primary language. I think in English when I’m writing; I tap into that language. Sometimes I will not know a specific English word—I won’t have it in my vocabulary—so I translate the idea into Croatian to be able to find it in the dictionary and translate it into English.

As someone who learned English as a second language, I know the process can be time-consuming and challenging. Does it leave room for creativity, opening new doors and possibilities? Or do you think it creates obstacles?

I learned to love the process. Writing in English as my second language really gives me an edge. It’s a setback in many ways; learning to write in another language is humongously difficult. But I feel it gives me uniqueness in expressing myself.

I process things in a way that corresponds to my language; then I translate and try to get the cadence right. My critique partner, who is US-born but Canadian, weeded out things that weren’t working—Croatianisms that didn’t sit right with her. For example, we have a saying here that when the sea is calm, it’s like oil—“more je ko ulje.” She said, “I don’t think this works—I’m literally imagining motor oil on the sea,” and I said, “Oh no, that’s not the image I want!” So it’s a process of fine-tuning. It’s a very satisfying creative process, but there are bloopers.

I’ve used that expression and told Americans it’s “still like olive oil” and gotten puzzled looks. Were there other challenges with language that emerged?

I wrote an article recently about going out with my family into the Croatian countryside, where I saw a rooster, but I used “peacock” when I translated into English. So, in the book, I wrote that the mother roasted a peacock for lunch. It was election time, and Trump was like, “They are eating the dogs and cats,” and I said, “Oh my God, people will think we’re eating peacocks!” In Croatia, we say “pivac” for rooster, and my brain did something there as it’s phonetically similar to peacock. It went through copyedits, three sets of passed pages, and nobody picked it up as they thought we eat peacocks here.

As a Croat, I smiled at descriptions like “jugo” being “the warm and wet southern wind that brings rain and joint pains and bad moods.” I totally get this—my parents blame various winds for everything from crankiness to headaches. Were there other things you felt like you had to explain to a Western audience?

I think of jugo in English, but it’s informed by what I think about jugo as a person living in Croatia. It can sound fresh to an American reader, but you have moments when it doesn’t work and doesn’t translate well. The American reader uses their own experience to decode what I’m saying, just like I’m decoding from Croatian into English.

Another situation was when I wrote about Ivona seeing her dad in the hospital. My critique partner said, “But how are they seeing each other? She’s in the room with 12 people lying in beds. Don’t you have screens between beds?” And I said, “No, we don’t.” So it’s a balancing act between trying to cover all the ground and trying not to be jarring to the American reader by not explaining or by overexplaining, which is not artful, and just telling it.

Your book is being published in the United States and the United Kingdom but not in Croatia—at least not yet—which you said is indicative of how difficult the publishing scene there can be. You told me about some of the hurdles—everything from figuring out how to handle things financially and taxwise to not qualifying for US-based awards and not being able to count on many of your Croatian contacts to buy the book.

I don’t want to push people to buy or preorder my book and pay double its cost just to get it delivered in Croatia, and then have to pay for customs and go through the gruesome bureaucracy process to get it.

The second [hurdle] is [not being able to hold] events. On the one hand, the introvert in me is hugely relieved, but on the other hand, the fact that my book will come out and I won’t have a launch event, friends and family will not rally around me, I won’t meet with readers, I won’t see my book in a bookstore any time soon, I won’t be able to sign my book in a bookstore—things that are truly a milestone for a debut author are not possible for me right now. But [otherwise] it’s a dream come true. It has a difficult side, but it’s still a dream come true, and I’m lucky to be doing this in the first place.

Everyone who’s been to Croatia knows it’s a stunning place, and the book leans into that, transforming it from a mere setting into practically another character. You write about the Adriatic’s translucent waters, our rocky coastline, cobblestone streets that come alive at night as men spontaneously hum a cappella songs. But you don’t shy away from acknowledging the country’s bureaucracy, corruption, and sexism. Tell me about weaving in these negative realities.

My wish was to write about it truthfully. And this is not to say that my experience of Croatia is the only experience; that’s like saying that I’m speaking for all of Croatia, which is not true.

I have a very emotionally charged love/resentment relationship with my country. I love it to death; I’m so happy to be here. I’m aware on a daily basis of the wind, the briny air, the sea, the privilege to be able to take coffee in the morning on Zadar’s riva [the waterfront] overlooking the Zadar Channel. It’s beautiful, but the other part of it frustrates me to no end.

I don’t think I set out to write that balance as much as I wanted to write truthfully about that and the characters. I said I wouldn’t shy away from the ugly side: the resentment, the poor decision-making, the jealousy, the messy relationships, the trauma-informed decisions that we make, the depression and anxiety—all those things are there. I strove to make my characters human, and I strove to make Croatia as human and flawed as any character in my book.

You said that the beginning of the book and the two main characters came to you fully formed, but there was one character you created from scratch. Tell me about conceiving these characters and their complex relationships, which are the heart of the book.

Ivona and Vlaho came to me fully formed. My writing group said, in 2021, “Let’s exchange 500 words.” I wrote those 500 words that are the first scene of Slanting Towards the Sea, and that scene has always been there and never changed throughout the novel’s many iterations and revisions. I understood Ivona and Vlaho, but I had to think about what happened to make them that way, and that was a process of exploration.

Marina also came to me fully formed, but Asier I really didn’t know. I created him; he was a complete construct of mine in terms of character development. He was originally supposed to be an American or British investor, and I gave him some boilerplate name like James, but I couldn’t pin him down. My husband has a colleague from Basque Country, so I said “That’s more particular than the US or UK” and used a name generator to find a name. That informed his mom, how his parents met, and his background, and he built himself up from there.

But even when the characters came fully formed, I really worked on drilling down on why they were making each decision—not the first, second, or third layer, but the fifth or sixth layer of what they were doing and why. Sometimes I wanted them to do something or decide something, and my critique partner would say, “I don’t understand why they did this,” so it was my job to excavate the reasons for this decision or course of action. That’s my favorite part of writing. It allows me insight into the human condition and the human psyche, which really brings me joy to explore.

Does revealing characters’ interiority come in the draft for you, or are you more likely to add that during revision?

For me, interiority is the easiest part, but I struggle with plot and how to figure out what happens next. I know general traces of where I want the story to go, but how do we actually get there? Interiority comes easier to me because I love being inside a character’s head and excavating those deep motivations and thoughts.

You are a trained book coach through the Author Accelerator program. You told me that the program and the books you read on writing taught you a lot, especially Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book; Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story and Story Genius; Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel; Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid; and, for structuring your book in particular, Miranda Cowley Heller’s The Paper Palace. How did these books help you write Slanting Towards the Sea, and what changed since your first book?

I trained myself to be a book coach and started a book club for writers. As a reader, I lean toward literary fiction, so we kept reading books that weren’t hitting the marks you usually see in genre fiction, but they were beautifully written and engaging. They took your breath away, and you didn’t know where they’d take you in the next step.

That’s when I started taking notes on what was and wasn’t working and why, and on how to structure a literary fiction book. I did a big dive into these accessible literary books, started figuring out ways to do it and how to do what I always wanted to do with the first book, but my craft wasn’t in the place where I could pull that off. In Slanting Towards the Sea, I knew this was what I wanted to achieve, and the experience of finishing that first book and starting this one was transformative in every way.

The plot unravels in one summer, but we learn about Ivona and Vlaho’s two-decade relationship from a different timeline. As a reader, it flowed smoothly, but as a writer, I could see how difficult that is to execute. How did you manage the different timelines and the book’s structure?

The hardest part was the structure. I wrote those first 500 words, knew the couple were long divorced, but how do you explain someone loving someone so much after 10 years of being divorced? That’s a stretch to begin with. Like, why don’t you just move on? So, I’m pleased the readers get that.

I thought there would not be enough material in the past to have that second timeline, so I’d have flashbacks. But as I was writing, I realized that there was more in the backstory than I could handle in a flashback, so it became obvious that I needed dual timelines.

Does writing this book inform your book coaching work?

When you look at things theoretically, things never go wrong—it’s always so clear. But when you’re trying to do it, it becomes a hell of a mess. There were times when I thought I would not be able to pull this off. When I was revising my book for Simon & Schuster, I’d edited about 30 percent of the book and thought that I wouldn’t be able to make it work.

But ultimately, you find the answer—sometimes listening to a podcast or reading a book informs what you’re trying to do, or overnight you think of a solution. Sometimes it takes months, but you get unstuck in some way. Working through those things gives you a level of knowledge and the ability to help other people in a much better way than just having the knowledge theoretically.

As someone who grew up in Croatia but has lived my whole adult life in the United States, I got chills from lines like these: “But we longed for home—for the oxygenated skies, the centering that is the sea. It is deeply ingrained in us, Dalmatians, this yearning to return home. Like we are born with a homing beacon, this need is always present, a rope tightening, pulling us back.” What are you tapping into when you craft these lines?

Thank you so much. That means the world to me. I don’t know much about the immigrant experience, but this paragraph is my own experience of living in Zagreb. In Dalmatia, there are fewer opportunities than in Zagreb, so sometimes, given how my own career played out, I wondered why we didn’t stay in Zagreb.

And this is the answer—there is this homing beacon. You are there, and you are not there, and you’re constantly aware of not being home and constantly feel that pull to go to Dalmatia, to be in the sea. When you go and are near the sea, that’s when you are home and you can breathe and say, “Now, everything is right.”

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Featured image: Photo of Lidija Hilje © Suzy New Life.