A serial novel

WILDCAT

Oil, concrete, and distance.
1970s Dubai · Fourteen episodes · Three acts
Begin the serial ▸ The story
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I  /  The Premise
This is not a story about oil. It is a story about what people build when they are far from home.

On a November evening in 1968, a Texas construction engineer named Jack Calloway steps off a water taxi onto the Dubai creek to take a job that will last the rest of his life. The city he arrives in has no electricity past the waterfront.

Twelve years later it will have the tallest building in the Middle East, and he will have helped build the ground it stands on. Across the boom, the embargo, and the reckoning that follows both, WILDCAT is about what people lose in the building, and what remains when they stop.

A lighthouse in the Gulf fog
II  /  The Season
Fourteen episodes. One city. Three acts.
Act One
The Creek
Episodes 1–4
Arrival, the proposition, the expat compound, and a country deciding what it will become. The creek is narrow. Smaller than you pictured.
Begin here ▸Reading now on Substack
Act Two
The Boom
Episodes 5–9
The port, the embargo, the flood of money, and the betrayal that fractures everything the work was built on.
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Act Three
Tidewater
Episodes 10–14
The desert, the school, the tower, letters home, and the return. What remains when the building stops.
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III  /  The World
An ensemble, far from home, building the same impossible thing.

Jack CallowayA Texas engineer chasing an approval that can never come, building the ground a city will stand on.

The Property StrategistLebanese-German, she reads land the way her father read shipping manifests.

The PhotographerBritish, arrived in the fifties and never left. He has the only record of what was here before.

The OfficialEmirati, whose father was a pearl diver, holding the line between the old world and the new.

The JournalistShe followed her husband to the Gulf and found her own work waiting there.

The Wife in MidlandHalf a world away, she decides what the library keeps and what it lets go.

IV  /  The Book
WILDCAT cover
Read it as it's written.
New episodes publish on Substack as the novel is finished. The complete WILDCAT arrives in print and Kindle in 2026.
The Serial · SubstackReading now ▸
Print EditionComing 2026
KindleComing 2026
Created & written by James Andrew Smith.
A novel built to move: dense, cinematic, and told in episodes. WILDCAT is in development for the screen.