"Bostjan's Flight" is the novel of a Slovenian childhood and youth that is indelibly marked by loss. The most important stages of the story, which are interwoven in an incomparable sequence of scenes in space and time, are combined in Johann Strutz's congenial translation to form a harrowing, aesthetically fascinating whole: the deportation of the mother and her death in a concentration camp, while the father serves in the German Wehrmacht; the father's return home and second marriage; the world of the dying grandmother reaching into mythical-magical dimensions; the loneliness and mourning of the young Bostjan - and the saving encounter with first love.