Ana is eleven when the Soviet soldiers send her from Bukovina, Romania, to Kazakhstan.
She is just one of many forced to leave behind her home and make the three week long journey via train. The trip is a harsh, humiliating one, but in spite of the cold and the closeness of death, life persists in the boxcar in the form of storytelling, riddles, and ritual. Years later, Ana recalls her childhood for her great granddaughter, who is considering moving her to a nursing home. Her story, told with unflinching candour, is a chronicle of a life lived during a time of great political and national change, a story of an existence defined and curtailed by lines drawn on a map.
The narration is interspersed with songs that transform into poems, and prayers spoken in the past that become prayers in the present. What links the narration is not so much a plot as it is the reader's astonishment. How could Ana survive such a series of experiences, and do so with her mind and heart intact?
A history of cruelty and trauma lies behind the banal markers of contemporary life. These realisations combine in the central theme of the book, one which the narrator describes as, 'stories bring you youth.