With a weathered photograph in his hand, a young man visits the Ukraine to find the women who might, or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by Alexis, his youthful and seriously inadequate Ukraine translator, an old man haunted by his memories of the war, and a mongrel bitch named Sammy Davis Jr Jr, he is lead on a quixotic search across a devastated landscape and back into an unexpected past.
As their adventure unfolds, the young man imagines - and reanimates - the history of his grandfather's village in the Ukraine, weaving a tapestry of symmetries that unites generations across time. Their journey moves forwards, until reality collides with fiction in a heartstopping scene of extraordinary power.
With breathtaking inventiveness and narrative control, Jonathan Safran Foer has written a book about searching - for people and places that no longer exist, for a lost history - that reaches heights of comic mayhem and hearthrending tragedy in equal measure.