Set in Vienna, the novel tells of the relationship between the penniless writer Rudolf Gurdwell and Baroness Thea von Takow, who treats her husband with cruelty and disdain, In spite of this, Gurdwell struggles to find the will to leave his wife, even when the devoted Lotte Bondheim offers him the prospect of true happiness. Yet this is no mere story of a love triangle. In astonishingly vivid detail, Vogel evokes the atmosphere of 1920s Vienna, taking us from fashionable cafes and aristocratic estates to the shoemaker's workshop and the almshouse. With decadence and poverty existing side by side, Vienna is depicted as a city on the brink of collape - a haunting prefigurement of the horrors to come.