Ahmet Sabo, the narrator of the novel, returns home to eighteenth-century Sarajevo from war in Russia. Numbed by the deaths in battle or by suicide of nearly his entire military unit, he is devastated to learn that most of his family has died of disease during his absence. Through the help of a friend and the love of a young Christian woman, Ahmet overcomes the psychological anguish of war only to find that he has emerged a reflective and contemplative man in a society that does not value -- and often will not tolerate -- the subversive implications of these qualities. Some remarks Ahmet makes at a party -- about human decency and fairness and the tendency of the powerful to trample over them -- lead him into the dark labyrinth of the novel's plot, in which his encounters with love and violence, intrigue, tyranny, and intellectual adventure continuously reshape his destiny and his sense of the meaning of his life.