Whenever she was needed, she was there for the family, but otherwise she moved quietly on the sidelines and was not given the attention she deserved. It was only after the mother's death that Starova began to reflect on her life. A novel emerged in which objects from the parental home and books from the father's library shed light on various strands of the tumultuous family past. We meet a young Albanian woman who was born in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, attended school in Thessaloniki as a half-orphan during World War I, and later married into a Turkish family on the shores of the beautiful Lake Ohrid. She learns to endure the linguistic, ethnic, and religious contradictions of her surroundings. We learn how this gentle woman saves her children from disaster through her presence of mind during the turmoil of World War II. Soon, the family must flee from their fascist-occupied homeland to what was then Macedonia, part of Yugoslavia. At that time, the author is just two years old. Starova compellingly recounts the hardships of the post-war years and life under Stalinism. This autobiographical novel is a bittersweet homage from a son to his mother.