The Fifth Point of the Compass

On 1 June 2009 a passenger plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. My cousin Georg, returning from Brazil, was among the 228 dead. He grew up as an adopted child in a small Italian village in the midst of the Dolomites; he had travelled to the city of Salvador da Bahia on the coast of Brazil in search of his biological mother. Seven years later his adoptive brother, Markus, crosses the ocean to follow Georg’s footprints into his own past.