Manhattan, early 2001. Three thirty-somethings, friends since college, find themselves torn between their dreams and the demands of reality: Marina, an apprentice journalist, crushed by her father Murray, who reigns supreme over the New York intelligentsia; Danielle, in search of a soul mate and professional recognition; Julius, a gay, penniless freelancer, yearning only to settle down but unable to bring himself to do so. Their relationship becomes dangerously complicated with the arrival of the seductive Ludovic and especially with that of Bootie, twenty years old, idealistic and provincial, whose education remains to be done. This double irruption triggers a series of power struggles and emotional crossfire, a game of seduction and pretense at the end of which the masks will fall. And Murray, "the emperor," will drag all these grown-up children down with him, in a comedy of lost innocence that will culminate on a certain September 11. Through her virtuoso play on points of view, her skill in connecting each individual trajectory to the fabric of History, Claire Messud offers us a portrait as ferocious as it is delightful of a narcissistic metropolis, and recreates an entire era, so close and yet already so distant.