Beginning with a series of imagined vignettes involving a father and daughter, David Albahari weaves both real and imagined narrative fragments together to create a multilayered narrative combining a wholly fictional novel with a chronicle of the narrator's visit to the United States. As the fragments accumulate, his deft combination of paradox and poetry provides a kaleidoscopic view of memory, love, and loneliness.

"In this extraordinarily tender metafiction...imagined scenes between a father and daughter somehow add up to both a novel and an essay on the terrible sadness of memory . . . " —Book Forum

"A wise book, a book of meditation, not so much on death but rather on the nature of absence . . . a significant work of fiction, a work that will certainly reward its reader's patience and lead him or her to reflect on the difficult question of who we are in relation to our parent, especially after the parent's death." —World Literature Today