[2][3] The novel recites amateur Gustave Flaubert expert Geoffrey Braithwaite's musings on his subject's life, and his own, as he looks for a stuffed parrot that inspired the great author.

While trying to identify which is authentic, Braithwaite learns that Flaubert's parrot could be any one of fifty ("Une cinquantaine de perroquets!

A second timeline lists important setbacks in Flaubert's life from the deaths of family members and friends, his expulsion from school, and the onset of his epilepsy.

The third chapter, "Finders Keepers," details a series of interactions between Braithwaite and Ed Winterton, a scholar who claims to have discovered a cache of previously unknown letters between Flaubert and Juliet Herbert, an English governess with whom the writer was thought to be in love.

The sixth chapter, "Emma Bovary's Eyes," takes literary critics, particularly the noted Flaubert critic Enid Starkie, to task for dwelling on minutiae and deliberately seeking out mistakes in an author's work, and continues on this theme to determine what sorts of errors in fiction are forgivable and which are not.

It continues the polemic against critics (now including Edmund Gosse and Jean-Paul Sartre), explores many important themes in Flaubert's work, evokes some specificities of the region in which Flaubert lived and set many of his novels, and lays out a systematic series of Braithwaite's opinions on which types of novels should no longer be written.

Flaubert's long relationship with Louise Colet, which necessitated train travel between Rouen and Paris, is a main theme of this chapter.