You May See a Stranger depicts both the cinematic pageantry and desolation of Cait and her Czech emigre husband Tonda’s twenty-two-year volatile marriage amidst the backdrop of the AIDS crisis, The Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in1989, the first dotcom boom and bust in California and the horror of the events of  9/11 in New York City. The many countries covered in the novel, from North America, Sweden, to Czechoslovakia, also fiercely compete with Cait’s and Tonda’s internal landscapes, their warring desires and aspirations. To which physical country, which emotional, artistic or spiritual road map, should Cait and Tonda pay allegiance? Tonda’s memories of his dark childhood under both the Nazis and the Communists remains an emotional minefield that Cait tiptoes though with ever-increasing timidity and frantic, unsuccessful attempts at solace.

Trying to smooth a path to the American Dream for Tonda, will Cait succeed in her struggle to overcome the parental wounds in her own life, shaped by an unstable yet Edenic childhood with an eccentric writer-mother among the bohemians of mid-century Greenwich Village? She is being torn apart by her own literary ambitions, and her longing for a nuclear family. Must she choose? The price to pay for making either choice is unbearably high.