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.

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.