"The successful businessman Pratt is compelled to face the painful failures of his personal life when he comes under heavy scrutiny in a murder investigation in a resort town in rural Austria. His relentless introspection forces him to confront such human issues as guilt, alienation, aging, and death. Using Pratt's fate as a prototype, the author eloquently demonstrates the interrelationship between the fluctuating fortunes of man and the faces of the natural world.

Exacerbating Pratt's isolation from his fellowmen is the ethnic animosity between the Austrians and the Slovenes to which he is subject from both sides. As an Austrian having spent his childhood in Slovenia, he is fully accepted in neither land; his fate anticipates that of many inhabitants of the provinces of the former Yugoslavia, who, in a far more ruthless way, become the victims of ethnic cleansing at the end of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.