In the beginning, a man scatters canary seeds on the streets to lure cuckoos that will bring back his beloved. Nothing is more enticing for the reader, who, as the narrative progresses, immerses himself in the story of a family curse and that of a cursed country that is tested like Job with successive floods, earthquakes, epidemics, dictatorships, and other plagues, and is saved only by the power of faith in myths and the miracles of myths. Such a myth unfolds in this magical novel that its narrator traverses, wounded but standing, a century of his homeland's history.