'I know you'll return.' These are his grandmother's last words to him. Leo has them in his head as he boards the truck to Russia one freezing mid-January morning in 1945. They keep him alive - through hunger, pain, and despair - during his time in the Gulag. And, eventually, they will bring him back home. Muller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond one man's physical travails and into the depths of the human soul.