Acknowledgements

These stories took eight years to write and would have taken longer without the people who told me what they remembered, and the people who told me what they did not want to remember and then told me anyway. Most of them asked not to be named, and I have kept that promise.

I thank my editors at Arsha Books, who read the first of these stories in 2012 and asked for the rest, and who published them in a year when it was not yet clear whether anyone would. I thank the organisers of the Mor-Wave evenings in Talas, who let me read prose to a room that had come for music, and the room, which listened.

I thank the staff of the State Archives of Irad, who found me the 1983 maps; the reading room of Talas State University; the parish of St. Tomas, which kept the yellow cards; and the families of the Kara-Unkur valley and of Bazar-Korgon, on both sides of the bridge.

I thank Aidana Mukash kyzy, who carried these stories into English and asked me questions about them that I had never thought to ask.

My father taught me the language these stories are written in. My mother taught me the road. This book is theirs.