The Great War is over. Gabriel Dan has been released from a POW camp in Russia and is making his way home to Austria. He comes to an industrial town in Poland and checks in at the once-grand Hotel Savoy, there to await news and funds from his family.

Here he meets a kaleidoscope of characters, a microcosm of chaotic post-war Europe in which rich and poor, itinerants, dissidents, and malcontents live lives of hope, expectancy, and despair in an atmosphere pregnant with revolutionary fervor.