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”.

Foer’s publisher, Houghton Mifflin, claims the novel confronts the tragedy with humour, tenderness and respect. Film rights have already been optioned by Hollywood.

Relatives of the terrorists’ victims have grown accustomed to profitable non-fiction spin-offs and documentaries. Joan Molinaro, who lost her firefighter son Carl, said: “September 11 has just become a money-maker for anyone who can do it.”

She gave the novel a cautious welcome, however. “My son left behind a three-month- old boy. The book could be healing.”

Oskar, a young prodigy named after the boy who stops growing in Gunther Grass’s novel The Tin Drum, dreams about inventions that could prevent future disasters.

“What about frozen planes, which could be safe from heat-seeking missiles?” the boy wonders. “What about subway turnstiles that were also radiation detectors?”

He is echoing the experience of many victims’ children who have wondered why their parents did not have parachutes or other rescue devices.

Lauren Eberling, who turned 10 on the day of the attacks, is haunted by the wish that her father Dean had stayed at home to celebrate her birthday. The contents of his wallet were returned to the family only a few months ago, yet the wallet itself has never been found.

His wife Amy has also received two sets of fragmentary remains. She thinks she would like to read Foer’s novel: “There are so many mysteries. Where is the wallet? We have pieces of him, but where is he?” In the novel, Oskar, obsessed with his quest, turns up at his father’s grave to disinter an empty coffin.

Families of more than 1,100 victims have been left without remains after the New York medical examiner’s office announced last week that it was impossible to identify any more body parts.

Foer experienced his own “extremely loud” explosion as an eight-year-old. An experiment to make sparklers misfired, throwing a friend bleeding, with his skin peeling, against a wall.

“Being a child, or being in shock, or just being myself, I told him what he looked like and begged him to describe my own face to me. I asked him if the skin was peeling from my face. He said no.”

Foer received more minor second-degree burns. “I had a very hard time after that, something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years,” he told The New York Times. It was, he said, a formative experience. “It made me a person.”

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