What happens when the facts of history are replaced by the mysteries of love?When Raimundo Silva, a lowly proofreader for a Lisbon publishing house, inserts a negative into a sentence of a historical text, he alters the whole course of the 1147 Siege of Lisbon. Fearing censure he is met instead with admiration: Dr Maria Sara, his voluptuous new editor, encourages him to pen his own alternative history. As his retelling draws on all his imaginative powers, Silva finds to his nervous delight that if the facts of the past can be rewritten as a romance then so can the details of his own dusty bachelor present.