Kim Echlin, the author of the acclaimed novels Under the Visible Life and The Disappeared, is back with a new book.

Speak, Silence is a novel that follows a journalist named Gota who travels to Sarajevo to cover a film festival alongside the fallout from the Bosnian war. She also has a personal mission: to reconnect with her former lover, Kosmos. Once there, Gota encounters a country and a man changed beyond recognition. But once she forms a bond with Kosmos's new lover, Edina, Gota has a new mission: to share the stories of women who experienced sexual violence during the war.

Speak, Silence will be published on March 2, 2021.

You can watch the trailer for Speak, Silence below.

Kim Echlin is a writer who lives in Toronto. Her other novels include Elephant Winter, Dagmar's Daughter, The Disappeared and Under the Visible Life. The Disappeared was shortlisted for the 2009 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

You can read an excerpt from Speak, Silence below.

They are still shooting, said Jacques Payac.
I'm going, I said. The borders are open.
I run a travel magazine, he said.
I will write a travel piece.
About war?
About film.
When the hell are you going to settle down?
Why should I settle down?
What are you hoping for?
I only want to know. To tell.

I had watched the war on television in Toronto for years. I watched life in a city under siege, saw people from a bread line bleeding on the ground. The cameras pulled back and I saw smoke and fire from apartment towers. My name is Gota Dobson. I saw these images on the same screen that I watched Looney Tunes with my only child. Intolerable shame. To watch old women in good leather shoes hurrying over rubble along the edges of buildings. To watch boys and girls playing on tanks. To watch people falling like broken clay pigeons in skeet practice. To change the channel. To live in the unattended moment. To be where I was not.

There was the Time cover of a crowd of prisoners behind wire fences, their ribs like empty cages, with a caption in red: Must It Go On? The war did not abate and the news remained clear and constant and the world struggled to rouse itself.

People knew. Still it went on. Year after year I watched. When Biddy was asleep at night and my work was put away for another day, I watched.

To know is not enough.

***

So I went to Sarajevo to write about the film festival when they were still fighting outside the city. They ran the projectors off car batteries. Someone asked, Why are you holding a film festival in the middle of a war? The director answered, Why are they hold­ing a war in the middle of a film festival?

I saw the Sarajevo roses in the sidewalks, the pockmarks on the walls. The city was alive with the temporary glamour of international film stars gathering in war ruins. Where was the rage? On the streets I heard wry humour and relief. I felt mourn­ing. Exhaustion.

I asked at the Sartr Theatre box office, Do you know a man called Kosmos?

Yes, said the young woman.

Does he have another name?

She thought for a moment and said, Everyone calls him Kosmos.

I left an envelope for him. Inside was a note in which I told him I would meet him that night at the Kino Bosna. I had not seen him for 11 years.

***

The announcement of a new court in The Hague had spread quickly around the globe. They would need judges, liti­gators, researchers, interpreters. They would write a new set of rules and procedures. They wanted to bring order into that law­less place, the border.

In Hamburg, Karla Vogel-Babić applied to be a prosecutor. She was married to a man from the region. Her specialty was international white-collar crime but she was tired of the greed. When she was a child she had lost her home in the rubble of her war-flattened city. She knew the smell of decomposing corpses. She wanted to be part of this new thing, a world court. A woman has no country and wants no country. Borders shift and crack into something different.

Other women in other places were also deciding to leave their homes to go to The Hague. They too wanted to act. They too felt their home to be the world.

In Lusaka, the deputy chief justice told Judge Gladys Banda that the United Nations was looking for African judges. At first Gladys thought she could not fit in with international lawyers. She had five children but this had never stopped her from doing new work. Her husband encouraged her and she thought, All the new judges will have to learn the new law too. She had learned how to navigate Zambian tradition and British common law. Perhaps there were things she could do.

All over the world, people were weighing the idea of joining the new court. History is now. In the moment of conscious­ness. New law on the border.

***

The Kino Bosna café was converted from a cinema, seats replaced with tables and red-checked cloths, and on the walls classic black-and-white photos of old Hollywood stars, Bogart and Hepburn and Monroe. The smoke-filled room was full of young students whose educations had been interrupted, laughing through their war trauma, trying to invent a retro-present in a city besieged for three years, 10 months, three weeks and three days. They crowded round a game of chess and mocked missteps, called out things like The chicken has laid a potato. For the young, hope is as natural as violence. They played U2 and Sikter and Protest. They joked, You think one president is difficult? Try three, a Bosniak, a Croat and a Serb. But it was not a joke.

Goat?

Kosmos.

He sat at a table with a woman. His hair fell over his left eye, and he moved with that familiar kinetic energy. He was pulling over a chair and saying, What are you doing here? In his eyes the ironic distance and intimate warmth I remembered, and I felt all over again blood pulsing beneath my skin. I loved all over again his lifted eyebrows.

He said, This is Edina, and she looked up, politely, was chain-smoking, did not speak. I wondered if she had no English. Her face was sallow, her bony fingers long, the skin around her lips a dry net of wrinkles. Some of her hair was tucked behind her right ear. She had once been pretty. Her shifting grey-blue eyes were more alive than her flesh, her energy an erect snake waiting to strike.

He was talking fast. He said that he had stayed away from Sarajevo for too long, could I not hear his British accent, was it not messed up, and was not British English boring, their insults boring, nothing interesting like my python.

He was a little uneasy.

Finally he asked, You?

I said, I have a daughter. I write. I came for the festival.

I thought, I came to see you.

He said, I was working at a small theatre in London, near a church, oranges and lemons, when the war started, and I did not come back. I thought I would go crazy watching the war on tele­vision, waiting, like waiting for Godot.

His charming soup of language. But Edina leaned back, detached from his I-wasn't-here-during-the-war stories.

He said, This festival is only for movie stars, in and out like a quickie. I am living here now. There was nothing for me over there.

I wanted to be alone with him. To ask him what really hap­pened. Now I had seen him again, I wanted to touch him.

I asked Edina, Are you in theatre too?

I am a lawyer. But I do not practise.

Kosmos said, She works with women from the war.

What do you do?

Abruptly Edina rose, walked into the crowded room.

I looked at Kosmos. He said, Sometimes she has to get up and move away. When she feels trapped it is better to move. It is difficult for her to talk about what happened.

But I asked her about her work, I said.

It is the same, said Kosmos. She runs a documentation centre. She takes statements from women about what happened in the war.

I thought, Terrible things happened.

I asked, Does she have family?

Her daughter and mother live in Vienna.

Where is her husband? I asked.

Dead.

Adapted from Speak, Silence by Kim Echlin, published by Hamish Hamilton Canada. Copyright © Kim Echlin. Reprinted by arrangement with the publisher.