Natasha Kaplan, a giggly, overeducated thirty-something New Yorker, is now married and living in London. Her life seems quite settled until she accepts the job of editor on an Anglo-Jewish magazine called The Nose. Things here are not what they seem, and Natasha soon discovers that The Nose is a battlefield of near-mythic proportions. As she pieces together a shocking connection between the magazine's founder, the enigmatic Franz Held, and her own family's hidden past, history merges with the present and looms darkly over her life, incriminating in unexpected ways, its taint extending to the very people she loves most.