The Line Beneath The River: A Novel Hardcover – March 9, 2026

The Line Beneath the River is a novel about a city that decides to build something too large to stop.When Zagreb announces its first underground line, the project is framed as inevitability: modern, European, overdue. Renderings circulate. Fences appear. Contracts multiply. What begins as a promise of movement becomes a system of commitments that no one individual fully controls.At the center is Viktor Kovač, an engineer whose role is to make things work. Around him gather politicians, financiers, consultants, archaeologists, journalists, and workers—each rational, each necessary, each convinced they are managing risk rather than creating it. As timelines slip and pressure mounts, the distinction between technical decision and moral choice begins to dissolve.Moving from public ceremony to private doubt, from conference rooms to excavation pits, the novel traces how uncertainty hardens into momentum, how provisional plans become irreversible facts, and how cities learn to live with the consequences of their ambitions.The Line Beneath the River is not a story about corruption in the simple sense. It is about legitimacy, performance, and the quiet mechanisms through which power sustains itself—long after the speeches end and the trains begin to run. Read more