The Palace in Fleet Street is a wild trip through the changing Ireland of today, a political love story peopled by scholars, radicals and prostitutes. Sean Carroll is a young Canadian obsessed with Irish women and the true meaning of James Joyce. He falls in love with a nurse called Marie Tuite who shows him some of the things Joyce wrote about. Their affair is conducted from the lounge of the Palace Bar in Fleet Street. When Marie flees to Baghdad, Sean is cast adrift again in nighttime Dublin where trouble comes in many forms.