Ocean State Libraries

Several years after choosing to identify as male to become a sworn virgin according to Albanian tradition, Mark accepts an invitation to join his cousin in Washington, D.C., allowing him to escape his vow and revert back to life as Hana.

A political comedy on two American academics who are recording story-singers in Albania. The two are on a project to show that story-singers were the source of Homer's epics, but this is much too highbrow for the district governor, convinced the pair are spies. By an Albanian writer, author of The Concert.

"While waiting to hear whether his newest play will be approved for production, playwright Rudian Stefa is called in for questioning by the Party Committee. A girl--Linda B.--has been found dead, with a signed copy of his latest book in her possession. He soon learns that Linda's family, considered suspect, was exiled to a small town far from the capital, and that she committed suicide. Under the influence of a paranoid regime, Rudian finds himself...

At the centre of young Ismail's world is the unknowable figure of his mother. Naive and fragile as a paper doll, she is an unlikely presence in her husband's great stone house, with its hidden rooms and infamous dungeon, and is constantly at odds with her wise and thin-lipped mother-in-law. She is not without her own enigmas, and she fears that her intellectual son-- who uses words she doesn't understand, publishes radical poetry, falls in love freely...