Within the walls of Echo Terrace, the world ... A beautifully resonant novel with a dazzling array of characters whose life stories are woven together into a breathtaking braid of love and memory. Farro Fescu is the proud and observant concierge of Echo Terrace, a condominium in New York City. Passing through his lobby at all hours of the night and day is an exotic cross-section of the world's population: an Egyptian-born plastic surgeon who lives on the fifth floor and specializes in gender reassignment; a fighter pilot, on the eighth floor, who flew for Nazi Germany during World War II; an Iraqi spice merchant and the world-famous crazy-patch quilter with whom he's having an affair; the adulterer's son, dreaming of becoming an undertaker; and the widow whose apartment is a jungle Eden filled with a menagerie of specimens -- finches, canaries, a defanged cobra, a monkey named Joe -- that had been the subject of her dead husband's research. – from Publisher description.