From a finalist for the National Book Award, a piercing novel about a writer haunted by the violence of his past and a family ruptured by war, for readers of Douglas Stuart, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Ocean Vuong.

1996: a boy raised in Finland spends the summer at his grandfather's house in Kosovo, a time that will mark him for the rest of his life, isolating him from his family and ensconcing him in a life of the mind, the complex escape of imagination.

Decades later, having grown into adulthood and built a career as a celebrated author, he travels with his mother to Kosovo, a country that has since been savaged by war, where fear still guides people's everyday lives. The journey forces him to delve into a past both real and imagined, into a mire of trauma and illness. Can memories be trusted? What can be forgiven? And what demands revenge? His questions spiral through his every interaction-with his relatives, with a family in need, with a seemingly duplicitous community leader-until he's confronted with the ultimate, the most suffocating question of all: what will it take to survive history?

Staggering in both its psychological acuity and tour-de-force prose, A Cow Gives Birth at Night shows us what it is to live a life without safety, to be drawn towards danger, and the haunting truths of what can happen in a family after the lights have been turned off.

PAJTIM STATOVCI was born in Kosovo to Albanian parents in 1990. His family fled the Yugoslav wars and moved to Finland when he was two years old. He holds an MA in comparative literature and is a PhD candidate at the University of Helsinki. He has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, and has twice been awarded the Finlandia Prize, Finland's highest literary honor.