Today sees the release of Neil Randall's eagerly anticipated new novel The Professional Mourner. The first book in The Yugoslav Trilogy that also includes Flags from the Old Regime and The Dead Crows of Velika Plana, it tells the story of a baby who wouldn't stop crying and who goes on to hold the fate of not just the old Yugoslavia but the rest of the world in her hands.

Here are the opening scenes of the book:

Ona rainy overcast Wednesday in the small town of a baby girl was born to Dragan and Nevena Stanković. Seen very muchas a miracle – the proud parents were in their mid-forties and had almost givenup hope of ever conceiving a child – it would be no exaggeration to say thatlittle Milica (as she was soon to be called) came kicking and screaming into thisworld. A perfectly natural state of affairs, many would assume. Only she didn’tstop screaming. Not from the moment she was safely delivered into her mother’sarms, to the moment Dragan and Nevena left the local hospital the following morning.Nothing seemed to pacify her. No amount of shushing or cradling or rocking. Evenwhen her exhausted mother, in the hours immediately following the birth itself,presented the baby with a teat, she somehow managed to both greedily suck themilky goodness from Nevena’s swollen breast and continue to cry, sob, wrigglearound, and prostrate herself in a manner the midwife (a veteran of over tenthousand deliveries) or any of the physicians on duty that day had ever seenbefore.

     “It’s the most curious thing,” observed DrIvanović. “If I didn’t know any better, I would say the infant actually enjoysbeing in a state of utmost distress.”

*

Ontheir return to the family home, a modest apartment in the working-classdistrict of town, the concerned parents did everything in their power to tryand settle the baby down – more shushing, cradling, rocking, and feeding. Theyeven let her suck on a wine-soaked finger (a now frowned upon but nonethelesseffective technique routinely deployed many years ago). And while their effortswere rewarded with brief periods of respite when Milica had literally screamed herselfto sleep – it didn’t last long. A matter of thirty or forty minutes at a time.  

      After two sleepless nights, they were nearingtheir wit’s end. 

     “Whatever are we going to do?” askedNevena, red-eyed and haggard through exhaustion. “I know all babies cry. Butthis isn’t natural. It’s as if God has blessed and cursed us in equal measure,as if He has given us the one thing we most wanted in life, only for that greatgift to be the most onerous of burdens.”

      “I don’t rightly know,” Dragan replied.“But you can cut out all that superstitious nonsense. Milica is a perfectlyhealthy baby. You heard the doctors say so yourself. This is probably just a tetchyperiod of adjustment. I’m sure she’ll be right as rain soon.”

      But that didn’t prove to be the case, andit caused untold problems in town.

*     

Bythe end of the first week of constant bawling all through the night and earlyhours of the morning, not to mention the vast majority of the day, theneighbours started to complain. Not just about the noise, you must understand –if many a resident did bang a piece of wood against their radiators time andagain when the crying fit reached a feverish late-night or crack of dawn pitch.But because these were still a deeply superstitious people, regardless of theincredible technological advances made in recent decades. They saw somethingstrange and worrying, portentous of evil spirits and bad omens in an infant whosimply wouldn’t stop crying.

     “Mark my words,” they said. “This don’tbode well for any of us. That there little girl is possessed by dark forces. Shebe cursed. If we don’t watch out, she’ll bring bad luck upon every decent man,woman, and child in the region.”

If you like what you've read so far, the book can now be purchased in both paperback and kindle in the UK and US.