Four thematically linked novellas that focus on obsessive relationships, stolen identities, and illusions of grandeur in the post-1989 Carpathian-Balkan region:
● An American expat in Europe appropriates the identity of a Romanian orphan in her desperate search for love.
● A dictator's daughter learns, while on a study trip to France, that her parents have been overthrown and are about to be executed.
● A minor character from a novel confronts her own insignificance.
A wife announces to her husband of forty years that she's just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.