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In sparse prose, Lojze Kovacic chronicles the refugee experience, drawing extensively on the specificities of his own flight from Switzerland for Slovakia, but ultimately transcending the prosaic to meditate on the universal experience of unsettlement.

The first volume of this three-part autobiographical series begins in 1938 with the expulsion of the Kovacic family from their home of Switzerland, eventually leading to their settlement in the father's home country of Slovenia.

Narrated by Kovačič as a ten-year-old boy, he describes his family's journey with uncanny naiveté. Before leaving their home, he imagines his father's home country as something beautiful out of a fairytale, but as they make their way toward exile, he and his family realize that any attempt to make a home in Slovenia will be in vain.

Confronted by misery, hunger, and hostility, the young boy refuses to learn Slovenian and falls silent, his surroundings becoming a social, cultural and mental abyss.

Kovačič meticulously, boldly, and sincerely portrays the objective, everyday world; the style is clear and direct.

Told from the point of view of a child, one memory is interrupted by fragments and visions of another. Some are innocent and tender, while others are miserable and ruthless, resulting in a profound and heart-wrenching description of a period torn apart by conflict, reflected in the author's powerful and innovative command of language.

Lojze Kovačič was born in 1928 in Basel, Switzerland. His father was a Slovenian immigrant, and his mother was German. In 1938 the family was expelled to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia because the father did not have Swiss citizenship. It was during the Second World War that Kovačič began to write, and just before the war ended that he published his first literary sketch, in the magazine Slovenska mladina (Slovenian Youth). The sketch was a description of his father’s death.

After the war, the family was regarded as politically dubious because, in those socially trying times, they had petitioned to emigrate to Germany. The writer’s mother, sister and niece were forcibly expelled from Yugoslavia to a refugee camp in Carinthia, Austria, though Lojze Kovačič remained in Slovenia.