In the early fifteenth century, as winter falls away, the people of Albania know that their fate is sealed. They have refused to negotiate with the Ottoman Empire, and war is now inevitable. Soon enough dust kicked up by Turkish horses is spotted from a citadel....

At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the main square of Constantinople, a niche is carved into ancient stone. Here, the sultan displays the severed heads of his adversaries. Tundj Hata, the imperial courier, is charged with transporting heads to the capital - a task he relishes and performs with fervour....

Young Ismail\"s world centres around his mother. Naive and fragile as a paper doll, she is an unlikely presence in her husband\"s imposing house, with its hidden rooms and infamous dungeon. Yet despite her youthful nature, she is not without her own enigmas....

28 June 1389, the Field of the Blackbirds. A Christian army made up of Serbs, Bosnians, Albanians and Romanians confront an Ottoman army. In ten hours the battle is over, and the Muslims possess the field; an outcome that has haunted the vanquished ever since....

At the heart of the Sultan\"s vast empire stands the mysterious Palace of Dreams. Inside, the dreams of every citizen are collected, sorted and interpreted in order to identify the \"master-dreams\" that will provide the clues to the Empire\"s destiny and that of its Monarch....

Twenty years after the end of the Second World War, an Italian general is despatched to Albania to recover his country\"s dead. Once there he meets a German general who is engaged upon an identical mission, and their conversations brings out into the open the extent of their horror and guilt, newly exacerbated by their present task....

A haunting yet humorous evocation of a society dangerously trapped in its past. Two Irish-American scholars from Harvard journey to Albania in the 1930s with a tape recorder (a \"new fangled\" invention) in order to record the last genuinely oral epic singers....

1958. In a dorm room in Moscow, a young writer is woken by the sound of angry voices on the radio. Through the fog of a hangover he hears the news that a novel called Doctor Zhivago has earned its author the Nobel Prize. There is uproar. The author,......

From the moment that Gjorg\"s brother is killed by a neighbour, his own life is forfeit: for the code of Kanun requires Gjorg to kill his brother\"s murderer and then in turn be hunted down. After shooting his brother\"s killer, young Gjorg is entitled to thirty days\" grace - not enough to see out the month of April....

In Enver Hoxha\"s Albania, news was closely guarded and speculation forever rife. When an engineer stepped on the foot of a visiting Chinese man, a Diplomatic incident resulted, and couriers between Tirana and Beijing carried back and forth annotated X-rays of The Foot....

From behind the closed door, the man shouts, \'Be on your way - you have no business here!\' \'Open up, I am the messenger of Death\'. As spring arrives in the Albanian mountain town of B, some strange things are emerging in the thaw. Bank robbers strike the National Bank. Old terrors are dredged up from the shipwreck of history....