Harry Citron - Bostonian, Harvard man, and Distinguished Professor of Literature - has lived for twenty years in the shadow of a brief but passionate affair with a French woman. As the novel opens Harry has decided to leave academia, both to search for his lost love in France and to try to find the meaning in his life that academia never provided. He sets off for Paris, not to continue his critical studies of Camus and Sartre but to be them, searching all the while for the elusive Suzanne.

But what Harry finds in Paris surprises him and the reader: his long-remembered lover is dramatically changed and all that she was has been recreated in her daughter. As we revisit Harry’s life and consider his present, we come to see that as illusions of ourselves fall away, we are ultimately left with what is our own unique act of creation: our lives, our sonatas.

Harry’s sonata is tinged with existential angst as he moves inexorably to his death in this heart-wrenching novel of a man’s search for himself in a world in which he has difficulty fitting.