Emil, the mysterious narrator, has been abandoned by the woman he loves. Filled with doubt and nostalgia, bent on therapy or distraction or revenge, he wanders the city in search of her. Driven by the anguish of rejection and desire, he writes twenty-six letters to his fugitive lover, each an intricately detailed account of his affairs with twenty-six women who preceded her.

Each of these figures bears an uncanny resemblance to a famous literary heroine, from Proust's Albertine to Fitzgerald's Daisy to Nabokov's Lolita to Queneau's Zazie.

One by one, in alphabetical order, Emil's letters adopt the tone, style, and substance of the great novelists of the twentieth century, while, in recollection, his past love affairs grow increasingly extravagant and hallucinatory. As we follow his physical and creative journey, we try to unravel fact from fantasy, emotion from delusion, while searching for clues to the novel's amorous alphabet, the building blocks of modernist and postmodernist literature.