Publisher's Synopsis
This is a story of broken bones and poetic souls, and of a love so strong it defeats several wars, two revolutions, two separations and two deaths. Osman, a Muslim, and Pinto, a Jew, grow up in multilingual Sarajevo at the beginning of the twentieth century, coming of age as young men just in time to find themselves drafted into their Austro-Hungarian imperial overlords' army, and floating to war on a tide of mud, fear, violence and horror that will carry them as POWs deep into the central Asian steppe, where the waves of the Russian Revolution break over them. A baby daughter arrives, as does a ghost, and this caravan of three endures evacuations, migrations and frostbite, crossing deserts, passes, trenches, before reaching the haze of Shanghai, and another world war, and another revolution. And all the while they are accompanied by a noisily absent God.
