The Son is the story of one night in the life of a writer in the Montenegrin city of Ulcinj.

His wife has left him; his father's farm is burning ... but he hates his father anyway; he walks into town and has a series of strange encounters, with a prostitute, an old school friend, a Muslim preacher and a group of leprous refugees. Though seemingly suffused with self-hatred and a repulsion of life, The Son's misanthropic insights cast an oddly life-affirming spell on the reader.

Andrej Nikolaidis is Montenegro's most controversial writer, as well as being its most awarded one. His first critically acclaimed novel Mimesis (2003) was followed by The Son (2006), The Coming (2009), Till Kingdom Come (2012) and The Hungarian Sentence (2016). An ardent supporter of Montenegrin independence, anti-war activist and promoter of human rights, Nikolaidis became known for his political views and public feuds. He writes regular columns for the daily Montenegrin newspaper Vijesti, and has written a number of articles for the Guardian UK.

'The Son' follows one night in the life of a hero with no name, a writer whose life is falling apart. That afternoon, his wife left him, while for many years he has been in conflict with his father, who blames him for his mother s death. Incapable of finding inner calm, he leaves into the warm, Mediterranean night, in the city of Ulcinj, itself a multilayered mixture of European dimensions, African influences, and the communist past. The hero of The Son is a man who can t adapt to new times and rules. On his journey into the night, he meets an assortment of characters: a piano student from Vienna who has abandoned his musical career and converted to Islam, a radical Christian preacher and a group of refugees from Kosovo. In the style of Mihail Bulgakov, the characters meet in the old city of Ulcinj, at the Square of the Slaves a location where the pirates who lived in the city until the 19th century would bring and sell captured slaves, including Miguel de Cervantes, according to legend.