"...my father's bust was so heavy that when I tried to take it down from its pedestal, it slipped out of my hands and shattered into a thousand pieces; I kept them until I was 36, in our third-floor apartment on the corner of Normandie and Sunset, until the day a complete stranger pieced the fragments together, set them down in front of me, and disappeared.” The sudden appearance of the American prostitute—the stranger—in the Los Angeles apartment shattered the fragile balance of the exiled family, who were living on memories of their Beirut neighborhood, abandoned during the war. The worlds of the son—a teacher passionate about theater—and the father—surrounded by thousands of books brought back from his bookstore in Lebanon—clash amid cultural differences and moral considerations. In this novel, Berberian weaves an almost cinematic tapestry set in 1980s Hollywood, centered on the tensions of a father-son relationship troubled by passion and taboos in the face of the weight of traditional values.