Milica Vuckovic's New Novel 'Pet Parents' Hits Shelves

There is a man who drives Europe’s motorways by night and, as his headlights cut through the fog above Slavonia or Bavaria, rehearses a speech about the happiness of pets. His name is Beni, he sells products for cats and dogs, and he is so persuasive about other people’s tenderness that, it seems, he has left none for his own. That frame, somewhere between advertising euphoria and the silence of a night-time cabin, opens Milica Vuckovic’s new novel ‘Pet Parents’, which reaches bookstores on July 23 after circulating online since mid-month.

Published by Laguna, the novel traces the loneliness and the cracks that open, almost imperceptibly, in families, in relationships and within ourselves. Alongside Beni there is Marija and her surgeon husband, a marriage in which everything sits in its proper place precisely to the degree that it sits empty. Vuckovic does not write about grand collapses but about the small ones, about the silences at the dinner table and about the love we most easily lavish on animals because they ask us for no explanation.

Who is this writer who paints and painter who writes?

Milica Vuckovic (born 1989) is one of those names that refuse to be filed under a single heading. She holds a doctorate in the arts and works as a painter, with studios in Belgrade and Herceg Novi, and her prose carries exactly that painterly instinct, a taste for the frame, the colour and the detail that holds an entire scene. Her 2021 novel ‘A Fatal Outcome of Athletic Injuries’ was translated into French and German and won the ‘Golden Sunflower’ award, carrying her from a domestic readership onto the European map of contemporary fiction.

That double vision, the eye that paints and the eye that narrates, is probably why her books feel as though they were first seen and only then written down. In her work a landscape is never mere set dressing; it is a mood, and a character is often betrayed by a single gesture before a single sentence.

Why does a story about other people’s pets cut so deep?

The answer is uncomfortably simple. Vuckovic has recognised that caring for animals has become the last unconditional site of tenderness in a world where people find it ever harder to admit to one another what they feel. Beni, who sells happiness to others while owning none himself, is not merely a likeable anti-hero; he is a precise diagnosis of an age in which it is easier to be a good parent to a dog than a good partner to a person.

‘Pet Parents’, then, is not a book about animals, however much the title may lure us that way. It is a book about people who have learned to love at a distance, through intermediaries, through soft fur and a contented sigh that asks no questions. It is, in other words, about us, seen from an angle we rarely dare to face.

The publisher has prepared a small ritual for the quickest readers: the online exclusive runs from July 16 to 22, and the first 100 buyers receive a copy bearing the author’s signature before the book goes on general sale on July 23. For a writer who has already proven she can be both quiet and merciless, it is a fair invitation to buy the book and then read it as a mirror.

And you, when did you last show your love not to a person but to their, or your own, pet?