The summer before the Berlin Wall collapses, a young American art histo- rian whose husband has disappeared returns to the divided city seeking truths she believes he might have kept from her. There, she falls again under the spell of an exiled East German artist whose stories of Greek mystics once made him as irresistible as he was forbidding. In this novel of conflicting allegiances played out between a richly realized late Cold War Berlin and the stark beauty of the Cycladic islands, travellers, natives, and refugees circle one another warily, their fates hanging on the question of which trusts if any, will remain unviolated.