Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow

The fates of eight characters in the nineteenth-century Balkans intertwine in this metafictional book of strange quests and nested narratives for fans of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.

A woman who reads the future in the faces of her lovers, a dice-player whose unfailing luck becomes a curse, a manuscript illuminator who leaves his monastery to become a most fearsome bandit. Set in the Balkans in the nineteenth century, Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow follows eight characters—...