Mara is a translator. In her Greenwich Village apartment she successfully renders her native Czech into best-selling English, until one fine night she notices alarming similarities between her own Prague childhood and a 'brilliant novel' by a rising young star of Czech literature. Making contact with the author, Mara realises that he had been the protege - perhaps lover - of her now dead novelist mother. She threatens to reveal his plagiarism of her past and her mother's papers and is soon caught up in a cycle of threats and counter-threats. As the layers of deception in the lives of Mara, her mother and the young author are steadily revealed, the boundaries between literary creation and lived experience begin to evaporate ...