It is the summer of 1992, and the Lowes are living in a castle in Prague. While Alden manages a staff at the Czech Ministry of Finance and his increasingly disaffected wife, Becky, advises local woman entrepreneurs, their precocious daughter, Julie, is busy not learning Czech at Prague’s International Youth school–intent, instead, on pursuing her father’s right-hand man. This already precarious family life is suddenly upended when Becky flees south to Gaddafi’s Libya; there, at long last, she reunites with her mysterious William, the man who held her heart even as she married Alden twenty-one years ago.