Stray dogs : stories / Rawi Hage.

The iconoclast -- Bird nation -- Stray dogs -- Mother, mother, mother -- The whistle -- The fate of the son of the man on the horse -- Instructions for the dance -- The veil -- The duplicates -- The wave -- The colour of trees.

In Montreal, a photographer's unexpected encounter with actress Sophia Loren leads to a life-altering revelation about his dead mother. In Beirut, a disillusioned geologist eagerly awaits the destruction that will come with an impending tsunami. In Tokyo, a Jordanian academic delivering a lecture at a conference receives haunting news from the Persian Gulf. And in Berlin, a Lebanese writer forms a fragile, fateful bond with his voluble German neighbours. The irresistible characters in Stray Dogs lead radically different lives, but all are restless travelers, moving between states--nation-states and states of mind--seeking connection, escaping the past and following delicate threads of truth, only to experience the sometimes shocking, sometimes amusing and often random ways our fragile modern identities are constructed, destroyed, and reborn.