For the denizens of Primeval, the world beyond its fields and forests is but a dream. The outcast Cornspike raises her daughter among the creatures and spirits of the forest. The squire Popielski loses his faith and becomes obsessed with a game where progress is attained only by dreaming the right kind of dream. Nonhuman beings --- trees and mushrooms and archangels --- have their Times too, as do inanimate objects, which may be “more important for the world than people.” Yet their stories --- or Times --- are buffeted by the feral history of the 20th century, after war carries Michał the miller away from his family in 1914. Bloodshed, betrayal and the dramas of daily life mark the birth, life and decline of Primeval’s little world and Times, making us consider afresh the stories by which we comprehend our own.

A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death --- with one leg on the Polish side, one on the Czech --- was an international incident. And there are the Germans who still haunt a region that not long ago they called their own. From the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, these shards piece together not only a history, but a cosmology.

September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone --- or something --- seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world. Little does the newcomer realize, as he tries to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target.

In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind.