Night as It Falls

Amelia was one of those people who destroyed everything and called it art. 'Jakuta Alikavazovic's sentences and charged silences bring individual and collective histories into unpredictable, illuminating relation. She writes with lyric precision while making the limits of language felt. We need all of her books in English.' Ben Lerner, author of Leaving the Atocha Station, 10:04 and The Topeka School Paul is a student who works as a hotel night guard to make ends meet. Amelia, who studies at the same university, is the young woman who rents Room 313. Everything about her is a mystery: where she goes, who she meets - and where she comes from. Paul and Amelia become compulsively and inextricably entangled, until one day, Amelia disappears. Unknown to Paul, she has gone to Sarajevo in search of her mother, the country of their past and the ghosts who still inhabit it. But Paul, as well as Amelia, must come to terms with their inherited bonds and the paths that shape the future. Night as It Falls is a novel of high passion and low light, rich in vital ideas about identity, first love, class and contemporary anxiety. Imbued with melancholy and wit, it is the English language debut of a powerfully assured European writer.