Night as it falls - Jakuta Alikavazovic

A deeply contemporary and mesmerising novel about love, destruction, silences and the traces we leave behind.

Amelia was one of those people who destroyed everything and called it art.

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.

Jakuta Alikavazovic is a French writer of Bosnian and Montenegrin origins. Her debut novel, Corps Volatils, won the Prix Goncourt in 2008 for Best First Novel. She has translated works by Ben Lerner, David Foster Wallace and Anna Burns into French. She lives in Paris and writes a regular column for the daily newspaper Libration.

Jeffrey Zuckerman is a translator from French, most recently of Herv Guibert, the Dardenne brothers and Jean Genet. He has been a finalist for the TA First Translation Prize and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, and has won a PEN/Heim translation grant and the French Voices awards Grand Prize.

A sublime disappearing act, and a wild love letter to all that we're about to lose, have lost and are losing.

A rare, powerful and solar talent.
Le Monde

Impressive achievement.
Les Inrockuptibles