A Cow Gives Birth at Night

By: Statovci, Pajtim

From the celebrated author of Crossing, a finalist for the National Book Award, a piercing, candid novel about a man haunted by the violence of his past and a family ruptured by the war that ravaged their homeland, for readers of Douglas Stuart, Jenny Erpenbeck, Ocean Vuong, and Garth Greenwell.

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 again 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593702336
• ISBN13: 9780593702338
• Release Date: January 2027
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.3"