Tônu Onnepalu was born in 1962 in Tallinn, Estonia. He originally published Border State under the pen name Emil Tode. In 1993 Border State received the Baltic Assembly Prize, the most prestigious literary award in the Baltic countries. The novel has since been translated into a dozen languages. Onnepalu lives in Tallinn and on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa.Madli Puhvel divides her time between Estonia and California. She is the author of Symbol of Dawn, a biography of nineteenth-century Estonian poet Lydia Koidula.

This short novel. . .speaks suggestively about the agony of 'hoping against hope,' the intensity of expecting the 'great indescribable' to happen, as in Ibsen's tragedies and Beckett's Waiting for Godot." —World Literature Today"Offers a rare, brilliantly realized account of a lost man in the grip of Western excess, emotionally crippled by a world that is subsuming his own." —Translation Review