The Sava Crossing

Krapje, Croatia, April 1941. The Stanica family lives a quiet life along the Sava River — a country doctor, an English-born teacher, a fourteen-year-old son, and the grandparents who hold the farmhouse together. By the end of the year, the country they were born into will no longer exist.


Two years later, the war arrives at their door. Yedi Stanica, the family's doctor, is taken to a Nazi castle and forced into work he was never meant to do. His wife Bridgette, English-born and Oxford-educated, is taken to the same castle for reasons of her own. Their son Dee is hidden underground in a shelter his grandfather built after the last war, then sent alone to Zagreb to find a child resistance cell that calls itself the Sparrows.


Across the river, an American bomber pilot is shot down over Croatia and pulled from the water by two women who will hide him for more than a year and teach him how to live in a language he was never going to learn.


The Sava Crossing follows four lives held apart by the same war. A doctor making impossible choices inside a castle's west wing. A teacher learning every corridor of its east wing. A boy growing up alone on the streets of an occupied capital. And a stranger from far away who finds himself bound to a family he has never met. Their paths converge in the autumn of 1944, and the family's reckoning continues long after the last shot is fired.


Drawing on the documented history of Nazi medical experimentation, the Ustaše regime, and the child resistance fighters who carried messages and weapons through occupied Zagreb, Brian Stanley has written a novel about what people become when everything they were has been taken from them — and about the small, ordinary mercies that keep them human anyway. It is a book about fathers and sons, husbands and wives, the friends who become family, and the strangers who risk their lives for someone they will never see again.


"We are only here for the crossing," a father tells his son one summer afternoon by the river. The son does not understand. By the time he does, the world he was raised in is gone, and the road home runs through everything he has tried not to see.


For readers of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale, and Mark Sullivan's Beneath a Scarlet Sky — The Sava Crossing is a story of war, family, and the long road back to the people we love.