Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish emigre parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife's infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England's Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.