A teenage girl and her father walk over the mountains out of Ukraine and end up in Nazi Germany. A teenage boy is sentenced to seventeen years of hard labour in Soviet concentration camps. The brilliant career of a MIG jet fighter pilot crashes to the ground. Diamond prospectors in Yakutia turn bankers in Belarus. Dancing in winter in the Kiev underground. Trading peanuts for a Masters degree in Market Economics. Smuggling books across communist Slovakia. Ivan, the one left behind when all the rest of his family went west. These are the subjects of eight short stories by Australian born Marko Bojcun, collected during his travels to Ukraine and neighbouring countries during and after the Cold War. The stories weave together the lives of ordinary people living in extraordinary times and Bojcun's own quest to reconnect with his ancestral homeland.