For young Tomas, nothing in Istanbul is certain, except perhaps the lamppost at the end of his street that he touches every day for luck on his way to school. WWII rages, the spectre of the Armenian genocide haunts his parents and he is unsure of the affections of his neighbour Anya, the daughter of White Russian émigrés. Anya and Tomas fall in love. Ten years on, Anya is in the US studying medicine while Tomas tries to scrape enough money together to join her. He becomes the editor of a new literary magazine, and things seem to be going his way until one of his writers is brutally murdered, apparently because of a story Tomas has published. Can Tomas flee the country and rejoin Anya before getting caught up in the murder investigation?