The Son

Winner of the European Prize for Literature in 2011: 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 nineteenth century would bring and sell captured slaves, including Miguel de Cervantes, according to legend.

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Nikolaidis was born in 1974 to a mixed Montenegrin-Greek family and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia/Herzegovina. In 1992, following the breakout of ethnic strife in Bosnia that soon erupted into an all-out war, Nikolaidis’s family moved to Ulcinj, his father’s hometown in Montenegro, where he now owns a summer home. An ardent supporter of Montenegrin independence, anti-war activist, and promoter of human rights, especially minority rights, Nikolaidis initially became known for his political views and public feuds, appearing on local television and in newspapers with his razor-sharp political commentaries.