A city of stone, steep and harsh under grey skies, battered by storms, menaced by flood. It is World War II. Control of the city passes from Italians to Greeks and back again, until German troops move in after Mussolini?s fall from power. Armed groups proliferate: Communist-led partisans, pro-Nazi nationalists, mountain bandits. For one small boy the confusion and terror of war are the outer shape of life, as they have been countless ancestors under the long rule of the Turks. But the sights and sounds of the stone city and its inhabitants are filtered through his own imaginary world of ghosts and dreams, mingling with the reality of daily life. A cabbage from the market becomes a severed head, a neighbourhood woman is Lady Macbeth, swarms of mice the hoardes of Genghis Khan. Yet even when the German invasion establishes its grim dominion and extinguishes the realm of fantasy, the ?tender flesh of life? survives.