Stingo, an inexperienced twenty-two year old Southerner takes us back to the summer of 1947 and a boarding house in a leafy Brooklyn suburb There he meets Nathan, a fiery Jewish intellectual and Sophie, a beautiful and fragile Polish Catholic Stingo is drawn into the heart of their passionate and destructive relationship as witness, confidant and supplicant Ultimately, he arrives at the dark core of Sophie's past her memories of pre-war Poland, the concentration camp and - the essence of her terrible secret - her choice