On the edge of the Siberian steppes, a young boy grows up listening to his French grandmother's stories of France just before the Great War - a nostalgic portrait of a vanished world, but a bewitching one during the Soviet regime. Gradually the story emerges of his grandmother's subsequent life in Russia, through the horrors of the revolution and World War II. Torn between two cultures, he eventually leaves after the fall of the Berlin Wall for Paris, and discovers how far his imagination led him from reality. But he stays, until a letter arrives containing an astonishing revelation.