In his virtuoso manner, Florian Illies recreates the 1930s, a decade of rapid growth in political and cultural activity in Europe. Jean-Paul Sartre in the company of Simone de Beauvoir eats a cheese pie in Berlin's Kranzler-Eck restaurant, Henry Miller and Anais Nin enjoy stormy nights in Paris, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway experience passionate romances in New York, Bertolt Brecht and Helena Weigel are on the run into exile, as did Katya and Thomas Mann. In 1933, the "golden twenties" ended abruptly. It was at this time that the National Socialists seized power in Germany, began to burn books and inflict violence on Jews. The author takes us back to the era of global political catastrophe to tell about the greatest lovers in modern history. His book is an exhilarating and beautifully planned journey into the past that reads like a commentary on our ever more uncertain present.