After over a decade in prison, a young sculptor, Yuri Dilienko, returns
to his old neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois. He finds the town stripped
of so many places he used to know, while the town's familiar streets,
bricks and steeples trigger memories of his traumatic youth. To
convalesce, he sculpts from collected scrap metal, but his arrival in
town soon rouses a young girl, Lita Avila, to curiosity. Could this
reclusive and oddly quiet man, whose art is sensitive yet intense, truly
be guilty of setting fire to his parents' bungalow and burning them
alive? At once an homage to the urban grit of Nelson Algren and the
family sagas of Leo Tolstoy, The Fugue is a true epic that spans three
generations and over fifty years, a major new achievement in the history
of Chicago literature. It considers the effects of war and the silent,
haunting traumas inherited by children of displaced refugees. Gint
Aras's lucid yet lyrical prose braids and weaves a tale where memory and
imagination merge, time races and drags, and identity collapses and
shifts without warning.