A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin by a gesture of violence. As the wheels turn, his mind roams free in a feverish attempt to trace the genealogy of that violence in his own past and that of Europe as a whole.

Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family divided by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin – yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. A profound, stark and furious novel.