A fluent Russian speaker with a knack for gaining the trust of those he meets, Muhling's cast of characters is ready to tell him their complex, contradictory, often fantastical tales, full of grief and legend.Through the stories of the people he meets during his kaledoscopic journey around the Black Sea, Jens Muhling seeks to paint a picture of this cauldron of cultures and to understand the present against a backdrop of change stretching back to the arrival of Ancient Greek settlers and beyond ...