“He was lying on the ground, stabbed. On the windowsill was a plate with peach peels, and a sparrow was pecking at them. Despo was sitting with her back turned, looking outside. She did not turn around. She held her back straight. With blood on her hand, she had painted, deep red on the whiteness of the wall, the sparrow.” In Sparrow, a foreigner with a severed tongue enters a village in Pogoni, Epirus, becoming its silent center around which the stifling community of the village stirs. “He reached the first houses of the Country and over there some kids were playing. They saw him - a scarecrow on a donkey - and hid behind a corner. They had slingshots; quickly, they gathered some stones from the road left by the goats and took aim at him. At first, he thought fat flies were sitting on him and made to swat them away with his hand. When they saw him wave his hand like that, they burst into laughter, and then Graham saw the kids with the slingshots in their hands, understood, and summoned all his missing teeth into a wide, toothy grin.” Just like Sparrow, the novella titled Graham speaks to how love and kindness can blossom in ground that is inherently barren or has been left to desolate - here with a hero who is an alcoholic painter on an island, a man whose raw honesty and deep humanity remind one of a Christ-like fool. [Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]