Birds of Verhovina is a description of an unnamed totalitarian society in all its irrationality, absurdity, and implacability; provoking both laughter and shuddering in the reader.

The reader arrives in Ádám Bodor's world, the periphery of civilization, at the break of dawn. Adam, the foster son of Brigadier Anatol Korkodus is waiting at the dilapidated station for a boy who is arriving from a reformatory.

Soon afterwards, Korkodus is arrested for unfathomable reasons. Yet this decaying and sinister world is not devoid of a certain joie de vivre: people eat gourmet dishes, point out their interlocutor's hidden motives with incredibly dark humor and enjoy the region's stunning natural beauty.