To a Bosnian teenager just arrived in Kinshasha to visit his diplomat father, it seems like a scene straight out of Conrad: a sweltering night, bats flapping in the trees by his window, and ominous, thundering drums banging away somewhere in the "uncarvable" darkness.
As it turns out, the drumming is coming from the apartment upstairs, where a terminally stoned American is losing himself in the music of Led Zeppelin. So begins Stairway to Heaven, the first story in Aleksandar Hemon's new collection of short stories, Love and Obstacles.
What follows, as the boy gets to know his shiftily charismatic neighbour, is told with Hemon's characteristic mix of comedy, melancholy and verbal invention.
Recorded specially for the Guardian in the US, listen out for another story next week.
