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.