Dora Šustić's 'Dogs': A Train, a Suicide, and a Birthday Party

Sandorf Passage has published an excerpt from Dogs, the new book by Croatian writer Dora Šustić, in a translation by Ena Selimović. The passage places two deaths side by side: an anonymous Czech man who steps in front of a train, and a fisherman who collapses of a heart attack at a fiftieth-birthday party on the island of Krk. The book carries a 2026 copyright, and the publisher has granted permission for the excerpt's release.

What happens on the train?

The narrator is twenty-one, traveling alone from Rijeka to Prague to begin film school. The journey normally takes twelve hours. Near Brno, in the town of Modřice, the train stops. A conductor delivers the explanation in a single word: "Sebevražda." Then, in English: "Suicide."

The train sits for four more hours. Word travels between compartments in what the narrator calls "peculiar channels not always ascertainable." The dead man was roughly sixty, a local. Railroad workers had reportedly seen him that morning, crying on an overpass; by lunchtime they had tried to chase him away but judged him harmless. "He was rooted to the spot, waiting for the train, and boy did he ever."

Šustić's narrator, hungover and hungry, counts the meager contents of her stomach — oatmeal, a banana, a cheese sandwich, an apple, an empty pack of almonds — all of it "fully dissolved in alcoholic acid." She admits her curiosity about the dead man is "half-baked": "I was more interested in my story, my conjectures about his life. I reveled in my projections, which often prevented me from seeing people and things as they really were."

What happens at the birthday party?

The memory that surfaces during the delay dates to two weeks before departure: her father's fiftieth birthday in late July. He charters a boat, orders a hundred liters of wine for fifty guests, and reserves a section of a fish restaurant on Krk's north side. The father, an anesthesiologist, is sketched through his professional paradox — surrounded by death, he "always found ways to celebrate life and love."

His aphorisms carry the passage's voice: "Greater the knowledge, shorter the life. Only idiots never die." On love, he is equally blunt: "It will absolutely shatter you. You'll know, don't worry."

The party collapses into crisis when a young Englishwoman seizes the microphone and calls for a doctor. A fisherman has succumbed to the heat — a heart attack. The father runs to the boat and begins resuscitation; the narrator's brother Nino, a medical student, massages the man's chest. The father injects adrenaline into the fisherman's neck. The birthday cake, in a detail that lands with full irony, is shaped like an anesthetic syringe.

The fisherman dies. His wife and teenage daughter sit wailing beside the body; a black dog barks and scratches at the white wood of the boat.

How does the passage end?

The father returns, drinks a double cognac, cuts the cake, and dances with the narrator's mother to a Sinatra ballad: "her mother held him as if she would never let him go."

The frame then closes. "They'd scraped the old Czech man off the tracks, and the train set off full speed into my future."

The excerpt marks the English-language arrival of Šustić's work through Selimović's translation; readers can judge whether the full book sustains this material's control of tone, where celebration and death share a single table.