At first, June appears to be the ideal California girl - blond hair, blue eyes, a production assistant at a film company, and married to a hot property about to get his doctorate - but she abandons her home and job to follow her husband to Bulgaria.

Within a month of their arrival, June turns thirty and her husband leaves her for a young local girl. As difficult as it is for her to be without him and virtually friendless in a country on the verge of civil war, June doesn't run home.

She drinks too much, falls into the arms of a Mafia kingpin, gets caught up in the revolution, and little by little revels in her new vision of the world outside the American periscope. She survives and learns that loss can be an opportunity and that loneliness gives a person time to change her life.