Description: Peter Sis receives a letter from his father. "The Red Box is now yours", it says. The brief note worries him and pulls him back to Prague, where the contents of the red box explain the mystery of his father's Long absence during the 1950s. CzechosLovakia was behind the iron curtain; Vladimir Sis, a documentary filmmaker, was drafted into the army and sent to China. He left his wife and young son, Peter, thinking he would be home for Christmas. Two Christmases would pass before he was heard from again: Vladimir Sis was lost in Tibet. He met with the Dalai Lama; he witnessed China's invasion of Tibet. When he returned to Prague, he dared not talk to his friends about all he had seen. But he told Peter fabulous stories of his Tibetan experiences. In weaving their two stories together -- of the father lost in Tibet and of the small boy in Prague, lost without his father -- Sis draws from his father's diary and from his own recollections of his father's incredible tales to reach a spiritual homecoming and understanding. With his sublime pictures, inspired by Tibetan Buddhist art and linking history to memory, Peter Sis gives us an extraordinary book -- a work of singular artistry and rare imagination.

While my father was in China and Tibet, he kept a diary, which was later locked in a red box. We weren't allowed to touch the box. The stories I heard as a little boy faded to a hazy dream, and my drawings from that time make no sense. I cannot decipher them. It was not until I myself had gone far, far away and received the message from my father that I became interested in the red box again.

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