[1] Up to a point, the novel is somewhat autobiographical: The author was born in Germany in 1946 and came to Melbourne, Australia with her parents in 1948.

The novel chronicles the lives of a group of Jews – or rather, a Jewish family – in the U.S.A., in particular New York City, over a period of roughly seven months during 1991 and 1992.

Most of the characters in the novel are Jewish, and the reader gets a vivid picture of the lives of assimilated Jews in the U.S.A.

It is told by a third person narrator who is very close to Esther Zepler's thoughts.

There are frequent flashbacks to both the distant and the not-so-distant past and numerous references to the Holocaust.