Sara Nović Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

Sara Novic is a Croat American literary fiction novelist best known for her debut novel “Girl at War.” The author was born in New Jersey and went to high school in Croatia where she had relatives.

Earlier she had gone deaf while in middle school and this experience would go on to color most of her future endeavors. Novic always loved the languages and was lucky that she had access to three languages growing up in the form of American Sign Language, Croatia, and English.

After graduating from high school, she attended Columbia University where she was a student of fiction and translation. While she had never considered translation as a career or literary endeavor she was lucky to arrive at the university just when the university was launching its translation program.

After graduation, she would become a professor at Stockton University where she teaches and creates courses for Deaf Studies.

Aside from teaching and writing, Novic is the founder of the Redeafined blog where she advocates and writes about issues concerning the deaf community. She is also a Blunderbuss Magazine fiction editor.

Like many deaf people, Sara Novic was born hearing and it was only in middle school that she began losing her hearing. At the time, she did not know any deaf people and tried her best to hide her deafness which she believed made her lesser.

It was only when she was in her later teenage years and had learned American Sign Language that her perspectives started to change. Learning ASL and meeting other deaf people gave her a feeling of homecoming and great joy.

She also felt a sense of relief in terms of the sheer exhaustion and effort that she needed to expend to communicate in spoken English. She had always found lipreading exhausting, since it required a lot of context clues and guesswork.
Sara also hated using hearing technology which she knew could cause tinnitus and migraines and all these combined, resulted in listening fatigue over the years. She was lucky that she lost her hearing after she had already learned to speak and hence she can still use her voice.

Nonetheless, since communication is a two-way process and she cannot hear, she was often frustrated. By learning ASL she found communication became more equitable and accurate.

Growing up, Sara Novic always loved reading and many times she read all the books on her classroom shelf. The teachers often had to send her down to the school library as there was nothing else they could do.
The first work she read in which she realized the power of words was “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison. Sara read the novel in high school and with the interesting antics of her teacher, she transformed into a serious reader who critically analyzed and interpreted texts.
In college, she made up her mind to be a teacher long before she developed an interest to be a writer too. However, since she was the first person in her family to go to college she was unschooled on things such as picking a major. In fact, she believed a job was very different from the hobbies and art one enjoyed.

But before she completed her degree at Columbia, she had published “Notes on a War-Torn Childhood” which was a short story. She would ultimately publish “Girl at War” her debut novel in 2015.

“Girl at War” by Sara Novic is a work centered on the Croatian civil war between the Serbs and the Croats during the 1990s.

The lead is a happy and ordinary girl named Anna, who lives with her baby sister and her parents in a small apartment and loves to ride bikes with Luka her friend. But then people begin disappearing as bombs fall and the children begin to plan their bike routes around homemade explosives and traumatized refugees.

The climax of the novel is when Ana and her family undertake a fateful journey to the capital Sarajevo. They are hoping to get Rahela who is Hannah’s little sister to the United States, where an organization had promised to help her get treatment for kidney failure.
The work swings back and forth between the present and the past, as it tracks the little girl’s fight for survival in a chaotic war zone. It makes for a sensitive and fine novel that chronicles the life ad times of the protagonist in wartime Croatia.
Through dreamy sequences, Novic showcases her talent and heightens the readers’ anticipation of what comes next.

Sara Novic’s “True Biz” is an electrifying novel set in a high school for the deaf in which the learners find friendship and love and battle a range of injustices. The school in question is the River Valley School and the story follows several protagonists.
There is February Waters the headmistress, Austin a strong ally of the deaf community, a popular kid that comes from a family of deaf people named Austin, and a newly admitted student named Charlie that cannot use ASL which makes it hard for her to fit in.
Charlie’s parents had gotten her a cochlear implant against her wishes but February decides to make Austin her guide so that she can have better language immersion.

The two soon get into a romance even if Charlie still struggles to learn as she has frequent headaches due to the implant and her mother refuses to sign onto alternative therapies.

On her part, February is dealing with bureaucratic forces determined to shut down the school in addition to a troubled marriage. With complex characters who have to deal with injustices, it is an immersive work that is a stunning homage to resilience.

“America is Immigrants” by Sara Novic is an inspirational collection of biographies most of which are just a page long accompanied by portraits and illustrations. The work tells the stories of immigrants to the United States from more than 200 nations across the globe.
The brilliance of the work is in the vivid illustrations and sheer scope of the profiles as the author gives meaning and depth to a phrase that became common following the despicable treatment of immigrants and asylum seekers by the Trump administration.
Some of the profiles include those of Marcus Samuelsson the celebrity chef, the German-born Albert Einstein, the Pakistani Mohammad Salman who would become a famous first responder during 9/11.

There is Louisa Benson Craig that had been a winner of several beauty pageants in Myanmar before she moved to America and became a refugee advocate among many other entertainers and artists.

While it sometimes glasses over Native American contributions and experiences, it makes for a stirring collection appropriate for all ages.