Between Mountains

Maggie Helwig's stunning British debut is that rare kind of war novel, a gripping, poignant, thoughtful, subtly imagined story about the ripples that carry on long after the fighting is over, and about two people kept apart by history, ethics and human frailty. Moral, personal and social boundaries are transgressed, with tragic results - as a simultaneous interpreter at the war crimes tribunal gets too close to a journalist who reports from former Yugoslavia. Daniel 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 based in Paris, of Serbian-Albanian origin, careful, blonde, meticulous, but when she finds herself working for the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, fails to declare a 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, Daniel watches a dawn raid on the house of a suspected war criminal - a good father almost certainly responsible for thousands of deaths. And the story ends with an apocalyptic millennium eve.