Leeches is a novel about the search for order in a crumbling world, about the boundary between reason and madness, about intolerance toward “others and those who are different,” and about the dangerous allure of questions to which there may be no answers. An unnamed narrator—a writer and author of provocative newspaper articles—witnesses an unusual event on the Zemun waterfront by chance. His curiosity about what actually happened—if anything happened at all—leads him to a mysterious young Jewish woman, and at the same time, he comes across a stunning manuscript containing Kabbalistic texts. The story grows increasingly complex, leading the reader from everyday life in 1990s Belgrade through various paths into the history of the Zemun Jewish community and the mysteries of Jewish mysticism, until, through a winding labyrinth of conspiracies, mathematical puzzles, and the protagonist’s paranoid attempts to escape the rampant anti-Semitism—in a single paragraph so fast-paced he can barely catch his breath—finally leads him to the narrator’s desk on the other side of the world.