Kaethe Shalk has married into a family of disappearing German aristocracy. Having spent years in East Berlin, she faces a new life of boundless complexity when the Berlin Wall comes down and the ruin of the East stands in stark contrast to the exuberance of the West. Kaethe's journey from America to the broken ground of contemporary Germany becomes an act of recovery: of the lives intertwined by politics and passion, of memory and the invented self, and of Kaethe's search for a daughter lost to her, now grown and living in uncompromising isolation from her mother's past and present, somewhere in vast, resurgent Berlin.
