The novel is set between 1 January and 31 December 1991 and is narrated by Feliks Zhukovski, a naturalised Frenchman of Polish birth, who turns 61 soon after the novel starts.

Feliks, a long time Communist sympathiser, has spent most of his working life producing a travel guide to Iron Curtain countries, sold in the West. He is based in Paris, but for most of each year has travelled within the Eastern bloc.

The collapse of Communism in 1989 now requires him to reappraise his working life and plans for his retirement, and also his political position in a post-Communist world. His attempts to do this bring him back into contact with people who have been removed from his life for many decades: his half-brother, his mother and a former girlfriend in East Berlin – people whose experience of life and (in two cases) of Communism force Feliks to re-examine his own attitudes.

The story of the novel is Feliks’s journey of discovery and self-discovery during 1991: a journey that gradually (and with his intense resistance) transforms him from an impersonal ideologue into a humanist of the left. In the process, he is forced – with extreme reluctance – to admit that on certain issues he has been wrong, so that he needs to reappraise, not only the present, but the past as well.

The principal theme of the novel is that what we like to consider our rational beliefs are usually the product of personal emotional experience. Subsidiary themes are the concept of “home”, the regeneration of individual lives and the conflict between ideology and human life in 20th century Europe.