In his mesmerising first novel, the internationally celebrated short-story writer Miroslav Penkov spins the intriguing tale of an American student who returns to Bulgaria, the country he left as a child. His mission is to track down his grandfather and to find out why he suddenly cut off all contact with the family three years before. The trail leads him to a remote village on the border with Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains - a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here in the mountains, he is drawn by his grandfather into a maze of half-truths. And here, he falls in love with an unobtainable Muslim girl. Old ghosts come back to life and forgotten conflicts blaze anew, until the past finally yields up its plangent secrets.
About the Author
Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He moved to America in 2001 and eventually completed an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. He is the author of the story collection, East of the West (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and the novel, Stork Mountain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). His stories have won the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 and The Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. His work has been translated in over twenty languages. He teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas.
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