Best Seller
Hardcover
$30.00
Available on Jan 26, 2027 | 304 Pages
From the celebrated author of Crossing, a finalist for the National Book Award, a piercingly honest 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.
Years later, having grown into adulthood and built a career as a celebrated author, he returns 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 co-worker hiding his sexuality, with a seemingly dangerous spiritual leader—until he’s confronted with the ultimate question of all: what will it take for him 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 and the haunting truths of what can happen in a family after the lights have been turned off.
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.
Years later, having grown into adulthood and built a career as a celebrated author, he returns 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 co-worker hiding his sexuality, with a seemingly dangerous spiritual leader—until he’s confronted with the ultimate question of all: what will it take for him 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 and the haunting truths of what can happen in a family after the lights have been turned off.
Author
Pajtim Statovci
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. 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, including most recently for this novel.
Learn More about Pajtim StatovciYou May Also Like
Smarter Than You Think
Paperback
$17.00
Emporium
Paperback
$16.00
Fifty Great Short Stories
Paperback
$8.99
Samedi the Deafness
Paperback
$18.00
The Atlas
Paperback
$24.00
Kentucky Straight
Paperback
$15.00
Brothers of the Gun
Paperback
$22.00
Bad Sex
Hardcover
$28.00
Runaway Horses
Paperback
$18.00
×