After shooting his brother's killer, young Gjorg is entitled to thirty days' grace - not enough to see out the month of April. Then a visiting honeymoon couple cross the path of the fugitive. The bride's heart goes out to Gjorg, and even these 'civilised' strangers from the city risk becoming embroiled in the fatal mechanism of vendetta.

As Spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers, unknown under the tyrannical ancient regime, strike up the National Bank. The ghastly Kanun, regulator of medieval Albania's blood vendettas, is dredged up from the shipwreck of history.

Kristien's grandmother is dying and she finds herself leaving London to fly back to her native South Africa. Her grandmother is determined to hand down her treasury of family history, telling of magic, treachery, heroism and farce - the panorama of a nation's experience.

In the mid-1930s, two Irish-American scholars arrive in a small town in Northern Albania to carry out research on the surviving tradition of spoken verse epics, recording the last of the wandering ballad-mongers. They hope to solve the mystery of Homer's authorship of The Iliad and The Odyssey .

Mehmet Shehu was the presumed heir to the ailing dictator. So sure was the world that he was next in line, he was known as The Successor. And then, shortly before he was to assume power, he was found dead. But, did he commit suicide or was he murdered? This is the burning question.

A moving portrait of people in transition - between old and new, life and death. Germans flee the besieged city of Danzig in 1945. Poles driven out of eastern regions by the Russians move into the homes hastily abandoned by their previous inhabitants.