Kitty and Joseph meet in a bookstore in New York. She is thirty-two, an aspiring writer. He is sixty, a Viennese Jew, a famous playwright who has survived the Holocaust. In a faded bohemian hotel, they begin an obsessive and all-consuming affair.

Night after night he spins stories for her, tales of prewar Vienna, his childhood in Amsterdam hiding from the Nazis, his literary triumphs, the countless women he has loved and left. One day, he tells her, he will leave her too.

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