In an uncertain part of Europe at an uncertain time, a young girl wakes to hear voices telling her of her mother’s death. She lives through a bloody civil war and the uneasy peace after it, all the time hearing her voices, sometimes following their precepts, sometimes not, but always living with them. She never tells another soul about them. And all the time she longs for the mother she believes is dead. When her father remarries, she runs away and lives a wandering life, meets a sailor, Anton, sails with him all over Asia and is happy, except for the unsubdued longing for her mother which never leaves her. When he contracts cancer and dies, she is desolate . Her voices urge her to go and look for her mother. Eventually she lands on an island in some uncertain sea, and finds the mother she had believed was dead. Throughout this fable-like story, the origin and destiny of the universe is interleaved with her own: 'In the unfathomed universe, or one of them, in the solar system, or one of them, near the remote tail of a scattered galaxy, on a speck upon the surface of a wobbling planet spinning round its self-consuming sun – a woman hesitates, then steps forward and, light as a sparrow, brushes another’s sleeve with her pale worn fingers. You are Mira? she asks incredulously, searching the other’s face with memory-haunted and bewildered eyes. Mira?'