In search of the unpublished manuscript of a murdered Yiddish writer, American novelist Nathan Zuckerman travels to Russian-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s. In a country shackled by a communist dictatorship, he faces state oppression—a completely new form of writer's block for him. In the company of several persecuted writers, he quickly becomes embroiled in a series of bizarre and moving adventures and discovers a strangely sympathetic kind of heroism among his colleagues.