Ekaterina has just arrived in an unnamed city at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela with a pasteboard suitcase, a kerchief that covers her lack of hair, and little more than a rudimentary knowledge of English, the language in which she will eventually write her other phenomenal bestsellers. At every turn, Ekaterina's rise to fortune is rattled by her consuming appetite for pubescent boys. Her novels earn her wealth enough to take over the top floor of an aging resort hotel in the Bodarks, as her idol, Nabokov, had taken over a suite in a Swiss resort hotel after the success of Lolita. Ekaterina is a masterwork of illusion and allusion, and like all of Donald Harington's novels it affords delight from beginning to end.