The city of Vukovar, situated on Croatia's easternmost periphery, across the Danube River from Serbia, was the site of some of the worst violence in the wars that rocked ex-Yugoslavia in the early '90s. It is referred to only as "the city" throughout this taut political thriller from one of Europe's most celebrated young writers. In this city without a name, fences in schoolyards separate the children of Serbs from those of Croats, and city leaders still fight to free themselves from violent crimes they committed or permitted during the war a generation ago. Now, it is left to a new generation the children, now grown up, to extricate themselves from this tragic place, innocents who are nonetheless connected in different ways to the crimes of the past.
Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her students, a Serb, and is now in prison for having murdered her husband. But Nora herself is the daughter of a man who was murdered years earlier under mysterious circumstances.
