EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE:

AN ACCLAIMED young American writer has received a $1m advance for a literary novel based on a child’s experience of losing his father in the September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. It promises to be the first bestseller inspired by the emotional impact of the outrage in 2001.

Jonathan Safran Foer, 28, has drawn a fictional portrait of a nine-year-old, Oskar Schell, who is haunted by his father’s death. In Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, published next month, the boy roams New York looking for a lock that fits a mysterious key of his father’s.

Foer won a string of awards in Britain and America for his debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated, in which a young man searches Ukraine for the woman who saved his grandfather from the Holocaust.

“Both the Holocaust and 9/11 were events that demanded retelling,” Foer said. “With 9/11 in particular I wanted to read something that wasn’t politicised or commercialised, something with no message, something human.”

Salman Rushdie said the book “completely earns the right to take on the Trade Center atrocity. The powerful emotions generated feel deserved, not borrowed”.

It’ll be out early next month, and it’s already doing very well in the Amazon rankings.