When Liam O'Shea, a hardworking law student, inherits an unexpected fortune from the father he hardly knew, he quickly learns the perils of easy wealth are many and the road to happiness is rarely paved with gold. Feeling trapped by the guilt of the mother he failed in her final days and the ghost of the father he'll never know, he bails on a life of responsibility to embrace the louche slacker fantasies of a latter-day Lost Generation expat. As he stumbles through an ever-changing cast of well-heeled European misfits and halfwits, he tests the age old mystic conceit that for a wounded, wandering soul, the closest to the poison is where you'll sometimes find the cure.