In 1920s Russia, a deserter from the Red Army returns home to find his village empty, the men murdered, and the women and children gone, and searches the forests in the bitter cold, desperate to find his wife and sons.

A cow's magic milk restores youth to her owners and brings back the happiness they had tragically lost.

"Over the course of nearly a decade (1983-1991), author Lyn Hejinian visited the USSR seven times, staying frequently with her friends the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and his wife Zina in Leningrad. During this period, she embarked on translating into English several volumes of Dragomoshcheko's poetry, and the two poets began an extensive correspondence, exchanging hundreds of letters until Dragomoshchenko's death in 2012. During her fifth visit,...

In a novel examining the question of accidental war, American planes fly past the point of recall to drop nuclear bombs on Moscow.