The floods of August 2023 destroy the security of everyday life and force people who had previously lived alongside one another almost as strangers to become a community.
🔴 A novel about a woman who, after the age of sixty, once again searches for her body, desire, language, and place in the world – and about a life that continues to open up even after loss.
Reviews:
Miša Gams: Loneliness and the Search for Primal Closeness
On 22 May 2026, Miša Gams, a sociologist, philosopher, and literary critic, wrote about the novel in Jantarna lastovka.
She reads the novel as a story about loneliness, the search for primal closeness, emotional needs, and the desires that guide our everyday lives.
She is particularly interested in the position of the protagonist after the end of a long marriage and professional career – at a moment when she must once again learn the rules of closeness, falling in love, and dating, but this time in a body that society no longer perceives in the same way as it once did.
“Who even recognises the qualities a person acquires through maturity?”
Miša Gams also draws attention to an important question raised by the novel: what does freedom mean if an individual constantly lives in relation to others, their gaze, their expectations, and their own inner limitations?
The flood is not merely a natural disaster. It becomes part of the novel’s social fabric and a metaphor for forces that can, in an instant, destroy the apparent solidity of relationships and everyday life.
Read Miša Gams’s review in Jantarna lastovka
Engaging in Life-Threatening Activities – Including Flirting with a Stranger
In a longer essay by Gabriela Babnik Ouattara, published in Jantarna lastovka on 13 March 2026, the novel is placed in the broader context of writing about ageing, female sexuality, the invisibility of the older female body, and freedom.
“While reading Maja’s new novel, I have the feeling that her heroine is an acquaintance from the next street.”
It is precisely the heroine’s everyday ordinariness that is one of the novel’s strengths. This is not an idealised story about a “new beginning”, but about a woman who stumbles, falls in love, makes mistakes, returns, reads, reflects, and tries to learn how to live in a changed body and a differently organised world.
The novel also enters into an intertextual dialogue with authors such as Slavenka Drakulić, Audre Lorde, Louise Glück, and Mila Kačič. Reading and literature become part of the protagonist’s way of understanding herself.
“Maja’s novel […] is therefore not only about making love to another person, but also means making love to the texts of others.”
The essay also particularly highlights the book’s second major current: the floods of 2023.
“The greatest natural disaster […] has probably never been described in such an authentic and literarily convincing way as it has been by Maja.”
At the moment of catastrophe, the intimate story suddenly grows into a narrative about community. Neighbours who previously barely knew one another need each other. The water sweeps away cars, electricity, drinking water, and the ordinary rituals of life, while at the same time revealing something elemental: one human being’s dependence on another.
Read the essay in Jantarna lastovka
Story Generators: Maja Drolec
On 12 May 2026, an almost hour-long episode of Story Generators (Generatorji zgodb) on Radio AGORA was also devoted to the novel.
In the programme, Where Will the Birds Fly When the Sky Runs Out? is presented as “an intimate, courageous, and literarily subtle narrative” about a woman over sixty who, after the breakdown of her marriage, once again searches for her body, desire, language, and place in the world.
The novel raises questions of ageing, love, loneliness, sexuality, and memory, while constantly connecting the personal story with a broader sense of the fragility of contemporary life.
Maja Drolec writes directly, sensuously, and reflectively; her narrator is not merely a woman looking back, but a woman who, despite her losses, continues to open herself to life.
Listen to Story Generators – Maja Drolec
Readers: “A Slightly Different Love Story”
The novel has also received responses from readers on Goodreads. One review describes it as “a slightly different love story” and particularly highlights:
“I liked the rich language, full of metaphors.”
The reader’s response also draws attention to the fragmentary or enigmatic structure of the narrative, in which the present intertwines with memories, events from youth, married life, and various romantic relationships. It is precisely because of this that the reader must gradually piece together the fragments of the protagonist’s life.
View the book and reader responses on Goodreads
When the Water Overflows Its Banks
One of the novel’s most distinctive features is its connection between the female body and the river.
Both change. Both have their own rhythm. Both can cross the boundary that their surroundings attempt to impose on them.
When the water overflows its banks, it reveals cracks in roads, houses, and relationships. The residents of an apartment building, who previously lived each in their own small world, find themselves without electricity, water, internet, and their usual sense of security. Suddenly, they are no longer just neighbours.
They become people who need one another.
It is precisely here that the intimate novel about ageing and desire expands into a narrative about the times in which we live: about climate vulnerability, solidarity, and a world in which nature increasingly reveals how fragile the structures we have taken for granted really are.
The Body as a Space of Freedom
Where Will the Birds Fly When the Sky Runs Out? is also a courageous novel about female desire.
The heroine, after the age of sixty, is not placed in the role of an observer of her own life. She still desires. She still falls in love. She still chooses, takes risks, makes mistakes, and begins again.
Her body is not merely a body that is ageing. It is a space of decision, pleasure, resistance, and rebirth.
And so the question posed by the title is not merely a question about an ending. It also contains the possibility of openness:
Where can we fly when the space we were convinced belonged to us suddenly no longer exists?
