This is the only book written by Lithuanian author Ricardas Vaicekauskas (1926-2011), now translated for the first time in English. It is a collection of 15 interconnected stories, based on the author’s experiences in the Soviet prison camp system (the GULAG) and in political exile in Siberia and in the delta of the Lena River.

Like tens of thousands of other Lithuanians, Vaicekauskas was deported to Siberia in 1941, when the Soviet Union invaded his country. He spent his teens in a labor camp on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. He was allowed to return home in 1960.

His stories first appeared in a magazine in Vilnius in the early 1990s and were published in book form in 1999.