A woman leaves the man she lives with and moves to a low stone cottage in a university town. She joins an academic department and, begins a research project on the poet Paul Celan. She is in self-imposed exile, hoping to find dignity in her loneliness. But then she meets Clara, a woman who is her exact opposite: decisive, productive and assured. As their friendship grows in intimacy Clara suggests another way of living - until an act of violence threatens to sever everything between them. A startling new voice in fiction: intelligent, brutal, sure, and devastatingly funny.