A venture into the strange (to us) world of the Albanian mountains, where the iron dictates of the "kanun", or blood feud, wrench apart the lives and peace of generation after generation. Although the protagonist is Gjorg, a young mountain man who, as of the first page of the novel, knows that by fulfilling the dictates of the kanun he will guarantee that his own life will end in one month, Kadare offers in addition a brutal portrait of the inhumanity of the Intellectual, in the person of Bessian...an academic to whom the blood and suffering of the peasants is the stuff of mythic and heroic beauty.