Ilana glimpses a far-off city in a magical egg, and embarks on a journey that will lead four generations of her family from the frozen forests of Eastern Europe to the sweltering Jewish tenements of New York.
This is a truly strange and striking tale that begins in the deep, and deeply magical, European forest, in the world depicted in Chagall's paintings and Grimms' Fairy Tales, and proceeds to tell the story of four generations of women from one fated family. Budnitz builds her book with wit and art somewhere in the gaps between magic realism, family saga and female bildungsroman.
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2000.
