Haffner is charming, morally suspect, sexually omnivorous, vain. He is British and Jewish and a widower. But when was Haffner ever really married ? Or Jewish ? When was he ever attached ?

There are so many stories of Haffner: but this, the most secret, is the greatest of them all.

In a spa town snug in the Alps, at the end of the twentieth century, the 78-year-old Haffner has arrived to claim his wife's inheritance: a villa expropriated by the century's totalitarian politics. But Haffner never does what he is told. In the spa hotel, he has tried to develop a mildly successful affair with a hungrily passionate married woman; and a much less successful affair with a capricious young yoga instructor.

But gradually, through the tribulations of government bureaucracy, he discovers that he wants this villa, very much. Now that he has to fight for it, he wants it.

For how can you ever desert from your past, your family, your history ? That is the problem of Haffner's story in The Escape. That has always been the problem of Haffner's life. How do you remain a libertine ?

So, through the digressions of his comic couplings and uncouplings, through three days of sexual farce, emerge the stories of Haffner's century: the chaos of World War Two, the heyday of jazz, the post-war diaspora, the uncertain triumph of capitalism, and the inescapability of memory.