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.