The news of his mother's death finds the writer in Budapest and prompts the opening of an old black box of family mementos. Inevitably, this leads to an unravelling of multi-layered stories and an investigation into everyday lives and times that no longer exists. Christina Pribichevich-Zorić gives us her perspective, as the translator, on this gentle novel: the search for a lost mother, the story of a country and a people who have passed; an elegy for Yugoslavia as well as a family.