Gaia, Queen of Ants

"Set partly in contemporary England and partly in in Soviet-era Central Asia, this novel follows the lives of Domrul, a young Meskhetian Turk with vague and painful memories of ethnic strife and political problems in the Uzbekistan of his childhood; Emer, his Irish girlfriend, the victim of a whole different set of ethnic conflicts; and an 80-year-old Russian-Uzbek client, Gaia, with a mysterious past"--