'Sylvie wanted to believe that misery could simply be replaced with happiness. Time was a straight line, stretching out before you.'

It's Summer, 1991, the dawning of the New World Order; a post-MTV, pre-AOL generation. Jerome Shafir and Sylvie Green, two former New Yorkers who can no longer afford an East Village apartment, set off on a journey across the entire former Soviet Bloc with the intention of adopting a Romanian orphan.

Sylvie is an ex-punk video artist locked in a loveless marriage with Jerome, a 53-year-old Columbia University professor who loathes academia. There are only two things, Sylvie believes, that will save them: a child of their own, and the success of The Anthropology of Unhappiness, her husband's long-postponed book on the Holocaust. But as they move forward toward impoverished Romania, Jerome's memories of his father's extermination at Auschwitz and his own childhood survival there impede them.

Kraus harnesses her talent for observational sensitivity to hit back with the grit and trauma of real, human relationships.