With the Second World War "at the fringes and uneasy borders of his characters," the author tells of "a German prostitute assigned to Prague, a girl in a Nazi home for orphans, and a young woman working as a cashier in a movie theater [as they] lose themselves in a world of cruelty and collapsing social order while their inner worlds teem with the fascination of life--sexual fantasy, naive idealism, vengefulness, inchoate visions of justice."--Jacket.