Bron is a thirty-year-old writer living in London, a seemingly incurable heartbreaker and dodger of commitment. Bron develops a fascination with the symbolist artist Paul Marotte, and uses his passionate life as a prominent example in the book he is writing about love at first sight. Then, a visit to a friend in Devon pushes Bron into the path of the beautiful, enigmatic Flora. Suddenly Bron finds he is the living embodiment of his thesis: he has fallen in love at first sight with somebody he does not know. Flora denies having any romantic interest in Bron, yet why can't he shake the feeling that she does, nor that she carries around with her an unspoken sadness? Bron's quest to discover the secret behind Flora's apparent unhappiness takes him to Amsterdam, the former home of his subject, Paul Marotte. There he meets Christiansen, a mysterious art collector, who offers to help him find his heart's desire. But is he really what he appears to be? This is a gripping, searching novel that explores the nature of our most ready human emotion: love. Its elusiveness, its mystery and, most of all, our desperation to find it for ourselves.