Night as It Falls

Book excerpt: 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.