Treading Air follows the life of Ullo Paerand through thirty years of violent upheaval in Estonia.
Ullo is a talented boy with a remarkable memory. Deserted by his father as a child, he is forced to rely on his ingenuity to fight for a better future and, in due course, comes to hold an important position in the Prime Minister's office. Following the Soviet and German occupations, fate disappoints Ullo a second time. Deflected from his honest career, he works with the nationalists for the restoration of the Estonian Republic, but, when offered a chance of escape by a representative of the Vatican, he chooses to remain in his country. Thus he resigns himself to a life of menial labour in an Estonia very different from that of his youth and his dreams, Jaan Kross's narrative unfolds in stories imparted to an unknown "author" by the elderly Ullo. Shortly before the end, a teasing ambiguity suffuses his tale, but Ullo dies before he is able to answer the final question about his life.

Jaan Kross was born in 1920. He studied law at the University of Tartu and taught law until his arrest and deportation, with countless other Estonians, to Siberia in 1946. He, on his release in 1954, returned to Tallinn and devoted himself to poetry and to translating the classics, including Shakespeare, Balzac and Stefan Zweig. Later, his interest in Estonia's chequered history made him turn his attention to the historical novel, and he established his reputation as one of Europe's outstanding practitioners of this genre. He is now generally regarded as an Estonian writer of world class.