The stories in Evidence are a connected sequence of reminiscences, told out of chronological order, by a single narrator. Kostandin Bitri is a wanderer, uprooted by war from an unnamed eastern European country. As he moves first to Western Europe and then to North America looking for a place to live and an identity, he observes the societies he restlessly inhabits with an uneasy, distrustful eye. Sometimes seeking a foothold or an advantage, sometimes just passing though, he observes the ways people torment and use each other. He sees the worst impulses that humanity tolerates, not only in others but in himself.

He relates his experiences in random order as they might occur to him in an evening's conversation with a sympathetic but sometimes horrified listener. As an outsider, he observes corruption and banality, the dangers of ignorance in a brutal world, the need for caution and disguise. What he sees and describes amounts to a relentless deconstruction of power relationships: the power of the police over a terrorized population in an authoritarian state, of wealth over poverty in the bourgeois cultures of the West, of men over women, adults over children, of lies over truth. In his encounters with strangers he also sometimes meets with kindness, generosity and unselfishness, but they are rare, and as a person victimized and scarred by his past he cannot help finding such behaviour strange or naive.

In the final story he returns to his homeland to visit the last surviving member of his family, a distant cousin. Looking for the past, he finds a surprising, unrecognizable new reality.

While writing Evidence I was motivated by the fascination that many people share for things `foreign'. I also wanted to cloak my narrative in mystery and uncertainty. Not mystery in the conventional sense of What happens next? But something more along the lines of Who are these people and why are they doing these things? My favourite books have always been those that persuade the reader to turn the page, not because of a plot-driven story line, but because the world the author has created is so odd and so compelling -- that is, familiar while at the same time utterly outside our experience -- that the reader cannot pull him- or herself away until the final page. In works of this nature the world in which the action takes place becomes a puzzle that the reader is trying to solve. These books can be disorienting or even disturbing, but the best of them leave an indelible impression on the mind. Something else I was thinking of while I was writing is the sort of elemental sketch that with a few simple lines suggests a shape or figure, and yet when we look at it our mind transforms the lines into a complete picture. I deliberately stripped the narrative of detail in order to provide the reader's imagination with an opportunity to fill in the blanks.