It is the stuff of tabloid news: when a cleaning woman, a beautiful immigrant from the former Soviet Union, is killed by a suicide bomber, no one claims her body. And when a journalist gets hold of the story, the human resources manager of the bakery in which she found temporary employment is forced to make amends. What starts as a public relations operation, however, becomes a journey of atonement for the manager, a recently divorced man alienated from his daughter and indeed himself. And as he travels from Jerusalem to a village in the freezing North, bearing the woman back to her native soil in a Kafkaesque odyssey that includes a stop in a military base lately converted into a tourist destination, he discovers what it means to live—and love—in a world defined by terror.