Haffner is charming, morally suspect, obsessed by the libertine emperors, vain. The Escape tells the story of Haffner and his lifetime of metamorphoses and disappearances. But how can you ever escape your past, your family, your history? That is the problem of Haffner.

The Escape opens in a spa town snug in the eastern Alps, where Haffner has come to claim his widow's inheritance: a villa expropriated in darker times. After weeks of ignoring his task in order to conduct two affairs - one with a capricious young yoga instructor, the other with a hungrily passionate married woman - he discovers at last that he wants this villa, very much. Squabbling with bureaucrats and their shadows means a fight, and Haffner wants anything he has to fight for.

From these comic couplings and uncouplings emerge the stories of Haffner's century: the chaos of World War II, the heyday of jazz, the postwar diaspora, the uncertain triumph of capitalism, and the inescapability of memory.