Each of the eight chapters of Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow, which is set in the Balkans in the 19th century, follows the life of a single character from cradle to grave. Iana Boukova has assembled a strange and compelling cast, from a woman who can read the future in the wrinkles of her lovers’ faces to a scribe-in-training who abandons his monastery and becomes a bandit. But as the story of each life unfolds, Boukova’s exercises in biography become increasingly tricksy: lives overlap in complicated ways and the narration shuttles back and forth through time. In the novel’s final three chapters, Boukova reflects on her experiments, tracing the lives of a writer, a translator and a character called Remora, who represents ‘the full stop at the end of a passage’. With the translator’s role so central to these sections, it is gratifying that Boukova’s own, Ekaterina Petrova, proves so adroit. 

While Boukova’s metafictional writing has earned her comparisons with Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, her work is darker than their fictions. Calvino’s bandit becomes obsessed with 18th-century novels; one of Boukova’s ‘smiles as if holding a knife between his teeth’. She displays a sharp, cold awareness of ‘the capacity