Set in the era when Europe's thousand year thrust for universal fraternity detours into the communist tyranny, this novel tells the story of an ordinary man and an extraordinary woman, Frederic and Lia, as they struggle to stay sane in the face of civic stupidity and individual evil. Lia is called upon to open her arms to the difficult truth which has always been her pillar of fire. Frederic, as husband and father, strives to hold on to all that is real, and not be stifled by his natural skepticism. Their children, Regan, inheritor of a past of wonder and betrayal, fights for self-definition, and Mercedes, a child born wounded, seeks the source of healing within. This is a story about belonging and forsaking, the loss of all and the state of abandonment and finally, the coming to nothing which turns out to be everything under another land's new stars.