April 2024. A well-known Albanian writer arrives in Sarajevo for a one-month literary residency. By the next day, he realizes he has no real idea what to write about, despite the promising project he outlined in his residency application. At the same time, a photograph weighs heavily in his pocket—an old black- and-white portrait of four children taken at the most prestigious photography studio in his hometown, Shkodër. His father once told him these were his cousins, who had left Albania for Sarajevo during the aftermath of the First World War, sometime around 1918. Their names, and the shared surname Cukali, are handwritten on the back. And so, the dilemma becomes an obsession: Should he write about the writer’s creative paralysis, or should he trace the footsteps of a forgotten family history that began over a century ago in this very city?
Inevitably, it is the second path that pulls him in—transforming his residency into a journey of excavation, longing, and ancestral memory. Atthis point, the novel splits into two narrative strands that twist and braid like a double helix: the story of a poor family leaving Shkodër with the retreating Austro-Hungarian army in 1918, and the writer’s contemporary search for their descendants in today’s Sarajevo.
The movement in time spans over a century. The movement in space crosses more than 500 kilometres. The displaced family’s journey unfolds through shifting historical landscapes, moving from past to present in increasingly lyrical tones. Meanwhile, the writer’s investigation leads him back through time, growing darker, more fragmented—and more dangerous.
