From the critically acclaimed author of The apartment, a powerful, poetic, and haunting look at family, loneliness, desperation, and regret. An American living in London receives a phone call from a German policewoman telling him that his sister, Miriam, has been found dead of starvation in her Berlin apartment. Three weeks later the man, his father, and an American Consular official named Trish find themselves in the bizarre surroundings of a fogbound Munich Airport, where Miriam's coffin is set to be loaded onto a commercial jet an returned to America.