Five years after "A Normal Life," Vasilis Paleokostas returns. This time with a book that talks about his childhood and teenage years - years that marked and largely shaped his character. The romanticism, which as an element permeated the stormy world of "A Normal Life," is here in its natural setting, in the place where it was born. The places that in the first book are described here and there, either as reminiscence or mainly as battlefields, escapes, survival, appear here in the foreground, illuminated by the light of another era, forming the main canvas of a common, everyday, truly normal story. Vasilis Paleokostas recalls, wanders, and describes the mountains, the meadows, the rivers, the barns, the villages of the Greek countryside, and its people with the eyes and rhythm of a child, allowing us to live there with him.

The plan had been devised for days. Everything studied. Down to the last detail. Covered with the heavy blanket and pretending to be asleep, we waited for hours until our parents, who had lain down in the kitchen bed the night before, fell asleep. At the sound of Leonidas' first snore, we rose. Under our bed, we had hidden exactly what we needed for our purpose. Two sacks, two knives, two flashlights, and a pair of pliers! We took them, passed like shadows through the deliberately half-open wooden door of the room, and tiptoed to the main metal door of the house. With the same anxious turmoil that comes with trying to deactivate an explosive device, we slowly pulled the latch of the lock and slowly turned the handle to open it. As we slipped out, we closed it behind us with the exact same care and disappeared into the deep darkness... like spirits.

[...] "Whoever kills a pheasant goes to jail!" This threat hung over the heads of the villagers. With the anger of injustice overflowing within us, we made the big decision. To strike the problem at its heart by conducting a raid on the breeding farm! The plan we were to carry out that winter night was simple. To take with us as many pheasants as our sacks could hold and to release the rest, to quell the bitterness of injustice within us!