Clare Moorhouse, the American wife of a high-ranking diplomat in Paris, is arranging a last-minute official dinner crucial to her husband's career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by rash behavior from a teenage son and a random encounter with what might be a terrorist. Still worse, a dark secret from her past threatens to emerge. Like Virginia Woolf did in Mrs. Dalloway, Anne Korkeakivi brilliantly weaves the complexities of an age into an act as deceptively simple as hosting a dinner party