Carol, a 12-year-old Spanish-American girl from New York, travels with her mother to Spain in the spring of 1938, at the height of the Spanish Civil War. Separated from her beloved father, she arrives in her mother's home village and transforms the secretive family environment. Her innocence and rebellious nature drive her at first to reject a world that is both new and foreign. But she soon journeys into adulthood through a friendship with the village...

A father sets off from Moscow with his 11-year-old son for his sister's house in Koktebel by the Black Sea. With no money, nor means of transportation, they drift through the expansive and mesmeric landscapes at the mercy of chance. For the father, the journey is an attempt to restore self-respect and win back the trusct of his son. For the boy, the mythic coastal town holds the key to a new life

In rural Mexico, during the peasant revolts of the 1970s, Plutarco, his son Genaro and grandson Lucio lead double lives. On the one hand, they are simple country musicians, and on the other they actively support the peasant guerrilla movement against the oppressor government. When the army occupies the village, the rebels are forced to flee and leave their ammunition behind. Making the most of the fact that he looks like an inoffensive violinist,...

Mimi, a divorced aerobics instructor who is up to her ears in debt, leaves Montreal with her restless 14-year-old daughter and moves in with her childhood friend

Ivan, optimistic preacher, took in convicts to help around the remote rural church he ministers. One of his helps is a vicious neo-Nazi Adam. Grasping the extent of Ivan's preternatutal determination to look on the bright side of everything, Adam decides to shake Ivan out of his rose-colored world

When nine-year-old Eero's father is killed at the beginning of World War II his mother, broken by grief, is unable to care for him. She sends Eero out of Finland to live with a family in Sweden, away from the conflict. Feeling abandoned by his biological Finnish mother, he cannot quite attach to his Swedish surrogate mother. When the war ends, and he returns to his mother in Finland, his confusion intensifies Uncle: Biography of a humble man, retold...

A Nigerian peasant comes looking for work in Essakane, a dusty gold mine in northeast Burkina Faso, Africa. He quickly finds out the gold rush ended twenty years before and the inhabitants of this wasteland manage to exist simply from force of habit

It is summer, and thirty-year-old Antoine is forced to leave the city to return to his family in Provence. His father is sick, so he must assume the lifestyle he thought he had shed: driving the family grocery cart from hamlet to hamlet, delivering supplies to the few remaining inhabitants. Accompanied by Claire, a friend from Paris whom he has a secret crush on, Antoine gradually warms up to his experience in the country and his encounters with...

An orphan of the Rwandan genocide travels from Kigali to the countryside on a quest for justice

"A gifted young teacher takes a job teaching natural sciences at a grammar school in the country. Here he makes the acquaintance of a woman and her troubled 17-year old son."--Container