Dina Hrecak

Amazing mystery and spiritual novel that will change your view of human destiny and life.

On her 25th birthday, on the night when the clocks are moved an hour behind, Angelica finds herself in the male body, almost a century before she was born. Her reality becomes intertwined with his as she discovers who he was. Through the mysterious dreams she observes his rise from poverty to power in pre-war Belgrade, while at the same time her life seems to spin out of control.

In her novel An hour behind, Dina Hrecak (Belgrade, 1984) shows us in a deeply symbolic way how to deal with familial problems that are left like an inheritance to those who know how to deal with them. The novel starts with an hour that marks the change from the daylight savings time, that brings new challenges to the days ahead, and the need for rectifying old mistakes to the nights.

Angelica, the heroine of An hour behind, experiences the lives of her ancestors in her dreams from the view of her great-grandfather, Miodrag. The dead want the same as the living - absolution from their sins. The mixture of past and present seems unsolvable at first, many had failed before it. Angelica manages to do something no one had done before her - to take the best from both worlds and move forward with more certainty. Through the challenges before her, she overcomes the unsolvable and gains the most important knowledge - the sense of her own character, insight into the mistakes of her family members and the idea of what comes after death. A powerful tool.
Even though An hour behind is her first novel, Dina Hrecak skillfully weaves the story line and patiently shapes her often juxtaposed characters, contributing in no small way to what we call Serbian Family novel.