Long before a certain cannibal sipped his first Chianti or dined on his first human liver, a young boy named Hannibal Lecter received a stark lesson in mortality as war raged around him. But of all the horrors he witnessed growing up in Lithuania, none co

"As the Soviet Union redraws its borders in the wake of World War II, swaths of independent Eastern Europe come under the bitter yoke of Soviet domination. In Lithuania, one teenager, orphaned by the war and mute from the horrors he has endured,finds himself incarcerated in a Soviet orphanage, where he bridles against his classmates’ ruthless hazing and rebels against the place’s rigid pecking order.

But this is no ordinary boy, it’s the young Hannibal Lecter. He makes a remarkable escape from the iron curtain and journeys to the outskirts of Paris, France,where his only surviving relative, an uncle, lives.

Arriving at Lecter Castle,Hannibal discovers his uncle has died. However,the man’s mysterious and beautiful Japanese widow, the noble descendant of the Tale of Genji’s author Lady Murasaki Shibuku, welcomes him home. Lady Murasaki’s kind and wise attentions ignite lifelong passions in Hannibal for fine food, music, and painting. She leads Hannibal to recover his voice, but she cannot help him banish the repressed memories that haunt his nightmares, or shield him from the prosaic evil that lives in even the most genteel of places.

Commencing his illustrious medical career, Hannibal obsessively tries to plumb the depths of his own subconscious. Hannibal’s ghosts prove to be real people..."