Synopsis

The Land of the Eagles is the happiest there is. Even though there's no running water, even though there are more bunkers than cows, even though Ari's mother left her with her grandparents because she got pregnant too young to work, and even though when the Berlin Wall fell, the dictatorship wasn't the immediate end: in the Land of the Eagles, there was only disorder and murder and men with their faces covered. Of course, when the Berlin Wall fell, many left for Italy, headed for the opposite shore from the Land of the Eagles, which was the happiest of all. But Ari and her grandparents didn't; they stayed. Her grandparents felt too old to leave, and so Ari waited for her mother—who left on the same ship as everyone else—to come back and get her. There are two Aris in this novel: one is the little girl who lives in Albania in the 1980s and 1990s, and she has no shoes, because shoes shouldn't be worn out, so one goes barefoot; The other is a young woman who owns a ton of shoes, as well as running water, and now lives in the center of Milan, in an elegant apartment, spending hours in the shower because organic shampoos don't lather enough. The two resemble each other, partly because they're beautiful, and all beauty is the same, and partly because they're the same Ari.