A hot new voice from Canada with a brilliant, compelling, subtly nuanced novel, that has the immediacy and power of Rachel Seiffert's 'The Dark Room', set in a different war - about love and language, truth and lies, war crimes and the weight of history.
This is a novel about transgressing moral, personal, ethical and social boundaries with tragic results - as a simultaneous translator at the War Crimes tribunal gets too close to a journalist who reports from former Yugoslavia.
Dan is a war correspondent in Bosnia, a stringer and a loner, a truthteller up to a point, careless with everything except his sources - ("all right as long as I stay in a war zone"). Lili is a simultaneous translator of Serbian origin, based in Paris, young, careful, blonde, meticulous, who finds herself working for the War Crimes tribunal in the Hague, and fails to declare her fragile relationship.
Helwig unpeels the human cost of a terrible war, from Bosnia to Lambeth via Belgrade, Paris and The Hague. As the novel opens, Dan watches a dawn raid on the house of a suspected war criminal whom he has interviewed - a good father almost certainly responsible for thousands of deaths. And the novel ends with an apocalyptic millennium eve, as Dan finds himself witness to a strange and terrible scene back in London, while Lili, having lost her job, is literally blown about the Paris streets.
Set in the turbulent last decade of the 20th century, this is a thoughtful, gripping, beautifully written novel about wars that never end, and two people kept apart by history, ethics, and human frailty with a vividly evoked and frighteningly real supporting cast of war criminals, lawyers, refugees, journalists and a mad preacher.
