Charlie Citrine, suffering from steadily worsening troubles with women, career, and life, receives unexpected aid in the form of a belated bequest from his onetime friend and mentor, the poet Von Humboldt Fleisher.
This acclaimed story is set in an England that has suffered a nuclear holocaust. Society has regressed to an Iron Age, semi-literate state represented by the special language that the author created especially for this book.
Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.