John Hodgson

A tale blending history and folklore traces the occupation of the ancient Albanian stone city of Gjirokastër by Nazi forces in 1943 and the bizarre hospitality shown by a doctor to the Nazi colonel during a fateful dinner party.

At the centre of young Ismail's world is the unknowable figure of his mother. Naive and fragile as a paper doll, she is an unlikely presence in her husband's great stone house, with its hidden rooms and infamous dungeon, and is constantly at odds with her wise and thin-lipped mother-in-law. She is not without her own enigmas, and she fears that her intellectual son-- who uses words she doesn't understand, publishes radical poetry, falls in love freely...