At the heart of Emotional Arithmetic is a memorable woman: Melanie Winters, mother and lover, middle-aged, eccentric, courageous, quirkily unpredictable - and deeply marked by her past. For behind Melanie's present life lies the terrible story of how, as a girl, she was interned at Drancy in Paris - the way-camp to Auschwitz, where she realized that her parents would never return.

For two years, the friendship of an English boy, Christopher Lewis, and the protection of an older man, Jakob Bronski, helped her survive.

Years later, Melanie is able to offer Bronski, now an elderly heroic Russian dissident and a veteran of a Soviet gulag, a home with her family. Christopher, meanwhile, has become a novelist, and he too reenters her life. As the two men converge, the past swiftly upsets Melanie's precarious mental balance. She must confront again the demons of her past, and the difficult balancing of guilt and love, good and evil, duty and desire.