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—all defined by a quest, all marked by a hidden, often torturous talent—whose fates become inextricably interwoven. One of the characters, novelist Ian van Athen, may even be the progenitor of all the rest—although reality has a way of defying fiction, and vice versa, and van Athen soon discovers not even he is immune to the undeniable logic of story, to the twists and turns of his own fate…

Rich with classical allusions and nested narratives that recall the fictions of Calvino and Borges, Iana Boukova’s enthralling novel about the pleasures and perils of storytelling appears here in Ekaterina Petrova’s masterful translation, and is imbued with all the beauty and unexpectedness of poetry.