MEANWHILE ON A ROOF IN CHINATOWN--in the early 1990s, Alice, a middle-aged Swedish professor, stuffs her husband's ties into the dishwasher and leaves their pleasant suburban villa outside of Stockholm, suitcase in hand, on a blind exodus towards a city she knows only from glossy travel brochures. Meanwhile, her daughter Babylonia is perched on the roof of her shabby Chinatown apartment, agonizing over how how to break up with her depressive Hungarian boyfriend. Alice manages to get locked out on the roof of her daughter's apartment without keys or money. This begins a picaresque journey, where she descends into an alternative Manhattan of after-hours clubs, gangsters, booze and roulette. Throughout her 48-hour odyssey, she engages with a quirky assortment of strangers, including the mysterious Charles. To find her way back to familiar ground is at first unmanageable and then, perhaps. not so desirable as she first thought. Alice can surprise as well as be surprised, and this story charms and beguiles with its feel for a New York of the not-so-distant past, a shabby, crazy and sometimes romantic city.