She is a Polish graduate student, finishing her doctorate in New York. He is a Brazilian anthropologist, in the city on a three-month research grant. They meet by chance in the New York Public Library, fall in love, and move into a tiny apartment together. Tereza has a lover waiting for her in Poland, Jose a wife and child in Sao Paulo. It would seem this could only be the most temporary of affairs. Yet, as Tereza recounts the extraordinary texture of their lives together, a portrait emerges of a relationship conducted at the extreme edge of sensuality - a relationship defying all conventional definitions. Jose and Tereza have no common language, they are exiled from their cultures, and for each of them the body of the other becomes everything: spirituality, sustenance, almost unbearable pleasure. In the tradition of Fatal Attraction, Slavenka Drakulic has written a breathtakingly erotic, profoundly intelligent tale of love based on pure appetite that will thrill readers with its unflinching candor, even as it shocks them with its horrifying conclusion.