The Son follows one night in the life of a hero with no name, a writer whose life is falling apart. That afternoon, his wife left him, while for many years he has been in conflict with his father, who blames him for his mother's death. Incapable of finding inner calm, he leaves into the warm, Mediterranean night, in the city of Ulcinj, itself a multilayered mixture of European dimensions, African influences, and the communist past. The hero of The Son is a man who can't adapt to new times and rules. On his journey into the night, he meets an assortment of characters: a piano student from Vienna who has abandoned his musical career and converted to Islam, a radical Christian preacher, and a group of refugees from Kosovo. In the style of Mihail Bulgakov, the characters meet in the old city of Ulcinj, at the Square of the Slaves—a location where the pirates who lived in the city until the 19th century would bring and sell captured slaves, including Miguel de...

In a small town on the Adriatic coast, a local detective is content to sacrifice truth for the sake of telling his clients the stories they want to hear. At first, The Coming reads as a traditional detective novel, but suddenly changes form with the advent of snow in midsummer. When the town library burns down under mysterious circumstances, the detective's long-lost son begins to get involved in the investigations from afar. He takes the reader on excursions into history and recounts the life of Fra Dolcino, a medieval heretic who announced the return of the Messiah and also illuminates the life and work of Sabbatai Zevi, a Renaissance cabalist, who maintained that he himself was the Messiah. We learn that Sabbatai Zevi died in Ulcinj and left behind a manuscript, The Book of Return, which remains hidden. The unsolved mysteries of both past and present, as well as environmental anomalies, serve to create the sense of an impending apocalypse, giving way in the final chapter to...