A powerful romantic novel about a son's attempt to understand his mother's past leads him to a tragic love affair and the heroic story of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi by the Czech resistance. The narrator, the American-born son of Czech immigrants living in New York, grows up in an atmosphere haunted by fragments of a past he cannot understand. As an adult, he travels to Prague, hoping to learn about a love affair between his mother and a member of the resistance named Tomas. Ultimately unable to complete his knowledge of the past, he imagines not only the ending of their story but the beginning of his own.