Safona Chardan de Rieul, known as Safo, is working as a translator when she is abducted by the Russians in Poznan, Poland. She is confined in utter darkness in an old circus cage. Her captors have decided to kill her and bury her body in woodland. This novella, set in July 1969, is part of a substantial series exploring the symbiosis of vulnerability and durability. The series tells the story of Safo and her family from the time of the Second World War, and Mistress Cartographer of the Un-Light is the first instalment to be translated into English. In these novels Robert Czerniawski Rocherry has evolved a new genre of storytelling, a contemporary successor of the eighteenth-century Bildungsroman.