Twenty years after participating in Lithuania's independence movement as a student, Laima Vince returns on a Fulbright grant to post-soviet Lithuania with her three children. Over the course of four years, while living and teaching and raising her three children as a single mother in Vilnius, she conducts interviews with a diverse range of people. She listens to life stories, including those of traditional healers, who treat their patients using ancient verbal incanations, trafficked teenage girls and the activist social workers who shelter them, Baltic gay rights activists who fight and win the right to hold the first Baltic Pride March in Lithuania, Chechen war refugees and their Ambassador in Exile, a contraband butter smuggler, unemployed ex-KGB agents, and the unsung heroes and dissidents of the Cold War. This book illuminates one woman's personal odyssey into the tumultuous history of the Baltic States.