The stories in this award-winning collection depict life and its upheavals in the newly realigned ethnic checkerboard of pre-millennium Greece. Fais's artistry, at once exquisite and crude, takes the reader on an intense journey through alternate bouts of rage, panix, self-deprecation, lust and melancholy, as mirrored in the mindscapes of natives and immigrants alike. He is equally adept at the short narrative story form as at a minimalist novella, a monologue, a one-act play, a diary or a series of journalistic notes, all of which here coalesce into a symphonic whole themed around the (living) dead and the dying; inhabitants of a world forever changed.