Thomas Nesbitt is a divorced American writer living a very private life in Maine. Until one wintry morning, when his solitude is disrupted by the arrival of a package postmarked Berlin. What is more unsettling is the name accompanying the return adress on the package: Petra Dussmann. For she is the woman with whom Thomas had intense love affair twenty -five years earlier in a divided Berlin where people lived fearfully under the shadows of the Cold War....