From inside front cover: A novella and stories that are linked by characters, by locations, by interwoven substories, and by a literary voice ... Set in Chicago and Sarajevo, it is a book about the trauma of war, about how an exile makes a new life in a new land.

Some of the stories in the book have appeared, in different form, in the following publications: "Islands" in Ploughsares and Best American Short Stories, 1999; "The Life and Work of Aphonse Kauders" in TriQuarterly and, in Serbo-Croatian, in Best Yugoslav Short Stories 1990; "The Sorge Spy Ring." in TriQuarterly; "Exchange of Pleasant Words" in Granta; "A Coin" in Chicago Review; and extracts from "Blind Jozef Pronek & Dead Souls" in The New Yorker and The Baffler.