Shaken Allegiances spans 48 hours in a world askew¿almost absurd¿just after a devastating earthquake has struck and isolated Montréal Island in the dead of an icy winter, one week before a referendum on Québec¿s secession from Canada. No power, no communications, no access, and -40°F, but no heroes to the rescue; no Schwarzenegger, no Stallone, no Charlton Heston. Provincial and federal politicians are busy waging an ideological war, while coordination of emergency response is in the hands of a lunatic; a structural engineer and a disc jockey form an odd couple in their pursuit of fame, while the frustrated media seek ways of leapfrogging the collapsed bridges to undertake some disaster tourism of their own. Their fortuitous encounters, and problems with quirky opportunists, converge to help make things worse. Kafka would feel at home. Shaken Allegiances jolts with a disturbing and witty projection of today¿s unbridled narcissistic society, a disaster in full bloom that has sprung from the seeds of individualism planted in the 1980s. Its colorful characters, quixotic, ambitious, rapacious, self-righteous, naïve, conceited, moronic, lost, or otherwise flawed, provide a fresh, entertaining and cynical view of the inescapable human folly.