Seventeen-year-old Anna and her grandmother, Olga, sit in the empty living room of their home in a city under bombardment. The girl suggests they leave to seek shelter. The grandmother refuses. Anna realizes that Olga’s legs have gone paralyzed. Without hesitation, the granddaughter hoists her grandmother onto her back, and they step out into the unknown.
Bound together, as one body, the two women will confront the decay of a world—a world of shadows and beasts wearing carnival masks, of absent mothers and prison-like shelters, of child abductions, but also of all manner of beautiful creatures. Through it all, they will fight to survive.
Will they reach the border? And what will they have to sacrifice along the way?
This is a story of survival, a coming-of-age novel set against the atrocities of war. A struggle to retain the most basic necessities —water, food, shelter, safety, love—and some that are less obvious but no less vital: freedom, justice, solidarity, peace, and life itself.
This fictional story is inspired by real events from the war in Ukraine and the bombings of inhabited cities, such as in the Gaza Strip and other parts of the world.
It begins in a very poetic style and transforms to a breathtaking narration leaving quite an optimistic feeling.
Kastaniotis, 2024, p.272
