On the eve of a coup d etat, the wife of a diplomat newly returned to Turkey from the United States finds that the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fuat, is in fact a childhood friend. Having married more for status than love, and quizzically unmoored from the reality of day-to-day existence in the capital, she begins to nurse an impossible love for her husband 's superior, and in the process of telling us of her Bovary-like, novelistic infatuation, she confesses innumerable details of her life: her tomboyish school years, her independence and ambitions as a young woman, her surprise at her...