Clutching his vodka and his memories, he seeks refuge on an island in the Cyclades. There by chance he meets a young woman who reactivates love's vocabulary. His survival instinct faintly reappears through the distorting mirror of alcohol. Yet the craving is an irresistible, clever adversary that shows no mercy. He is drawn by his love to places that affect his emotional world ever more forcefully. Moving from Paris and Munich to London and a mountain village in central Greece, he meets a young woman and it becomes clear that the greatest magic is to be found in reality, not the bottle.

A journey full of love, denial and danger, where fiction is not that distant from reality. The answers will be found at Bar Flaubert. One man's quest to discover and understand the driving force behind an aspiring novelist who's written words seem to echo his innermost thoughts. Both a search for identity and an intriguing family saga, this tale follows the journey-filled with love, denial, and danger-undertaken by a young man who tries to discover why a novel by an aspiring writer seems to echo his own innermost thoughts. In Barcelona, Berlin, and Florence, he traces his Greek family's many connections and at last uncovers a mysterious ancestor who links together the strands of his investigation. Readers are taken on a journey where fiction is not that distant from reality.