Publisher's Synopsis
Lens Grinder's Shadow is multiple interwoven stories coming together on the backroads and hiking trails of Austria:
On the one hand, in eight parts, a young man in a concentration camp style blue-and-white striped shirt walks from Bregenz to Innsbruck in hopes of spending a winter-to-remember in the Alps. He meets up with Australian travelers, an EMO youth hostel night clerk, a sketchy hobo living for the thrill of the road, and an assortment of German weekenders who take him off the beaten track. On the other hand, in twelve parts, four women at major crossroads in their lives each in turn meet a young man accompanying a friend's casket to Nürnberg so her family can put her to rest. Elisabet is a singer suffocating from the business of song, Seannafair practices putting her poetry to music while looking for her big break, Natalie is tired of her second-class status in an academic world designed for men, and Greta is desperately trying to reimagine a life without her twin. Each lineage dances along the ridges and valleys of experience, at the end they are in the middle, bodies on this earth with spirits conveyed across distances, not relayed information, but pulse and breath, muscle and bone.
