Highly plausible fictional characters help create intricate and tantalising stories around the three ageing figures, all of whom have lived through terrible times. As they near their lives’ ends, each of them worries about the elusiveness of memory; Kabir’s is ‘an unruly monkey’, Campanello’s plays ‘hide and seek’, Chekhova’s is ‘going mushy’. Kabir has left the holy city of Kashi; he desires silence in his final few months, without the reiteration of the words of his hymns. He hears within him the rhythm of the cotton carder’s bow and is not distracted by the ‘superfluity of the visual world’. The epigraph of Maria Chekhova’s narrative is a clue as to how silence, her brother’s and her own, has shaped her life. Her story begins with death – not with regret, as the death is that of Joseph Stalin. Campanella’s tale commences with words from the Ash Wednesday liturgy at the imposition of the ashes, ‘Remember that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return’; the death that most believe brings silence. Within punctuating silences and solitudes, the joy and grief, laughter and pain, beauty and ugliness of the three lives is relived, in a finely crafted book that reads like poetry.