Darren Durant returns to Vancouver in 1988 after living in Te-hran for three years and coping with the chaos of the Iran-Iraq war, including nightly missile attacks. He is now determined to establish himself as a painter and find a dependable compan-ion. He had traveled to Iran after an agonizing separation from his beloved wife, Erica. Even the sacrifice to abandon his artis-tic life and work in Erica's flourishing software company as a computer technician had not saved their marriage. A particular canvas he had painted in 1985 at the shores of the Caspian Sea keeps wreaking intricate emotional situations for him and others, especially a married Persian woman who follows him to Vancouver. Bizarre events obscure Darren's efforts to heal the scars of the war and his failures in marriage and artistic career. Despite his intriguing romances, Darren grapples with the dilemma of committing to someone without getting emotion-ally hurt again, versus the prospect of ending up lonely and lunatic like his father. His lovers' competitions to monopolize him, along with plots by friends and foes for baffling reasons, further complicate his efforts to settle down.