About the author

A. Juri Wolff has spent a lifetime listening for fragments — the songs that carry a vanished people's memory, the stories a folklore expert still knows to tell at a particular stone, the silence where a culture's voice used to be. Some histories survive in the places that hold them. Others don't. It starts with music.

Wolff grew up in living rooms full of musicians playing reels and jigs late into the night, and became a musician too — clarinet, piano, self-taught guitar, and time spent performing in the kind of venues where a song can come alive and move. Songs, Wolff believes, carry what stories cannot: the memory of peoples who left no written record, preserved in melody and form long after the words have blurred.

The rest came sideways. Travels undertaken for other reasons kept leaving deposits — a shapeshifting spirit in an Amazonian forest, stories planted by a folklore expert in an Estonian wood, the living, protective mountain spirits surrounding Cusco.