In 1963, living a routine life on Norma Place in Los Angeles, recluse writer Dorothy Parker and bisexual husband Alan Campbell recall their often-rocky relationship, started thirty years earlier.
It begins in the days after Sadat's assassination in 1981 by an islamist cell of army officers. The American media had led an outpouring of shock and grief in the United States at the death of the heroic president.
A journalist sets out to report on a minor earthquake in the Australian outback, and finds that the tremor was a result of a small nuclear explosion - part of an extortion threat that has the government fearing nuclear blackmail.