Excerpt from Prague by Arthur Phillips, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Seven months ago Scott swayed very close to a heaving stage-front amplifier in a Seattle nightclub, and he bathed in a long-overdue and honey-sweet epiphany. "Look at Me, I'm Above It All"--an early hit during Seattle's dominance of American pop--roared over and through him, and though he knew the song's title was meant ironically, he chose not to take it that way; from that moment, he would be above strife, out of reach of another recently fumbled relationship, yet another unhappy work situation, and, most of all, his family's long-distance constrictions and chills and cruelties. He knew he would not return the next day to the small athletic woman who had been guiding his failed six-week effort to tweeze out and incinerate any repressed memories of his parents doing something even more sinister than what he could naturally recall. He stood between the amp and the crowd, and the sound peeled from him years of resentment, which he knew he would never need again.

He left the U.S. a week later, not informing his family in Los Angeles, punctuating nearly two years during which contact with his parents and his brother was already infrequent. He surfaced, breathing easily, in Budapest. There he put his college degree to use as Assistant Head of Programs at the Institute for the Study of Foreign Tongues, a privately held chain of schools--first Prague, then Budapest, Warsaw, Sofia, plans afoot for Bucharest, Moscow, Tirana--hawking that most valuable commodity: English.

It is not only at that school or at this table that Scott's ash-blond hair, nearly Scandinavian features, svelte muscularity (tank top), and patently Californian health stand out. In any corner of Budapest he looks positively exotic, an obvious foreigner even before he confidently mispronounces one of his few words of Hungarian, or, in slow, pedagogic English, pesters underpaid waiters in state-owned restaurants that haven't changed their pork-predominant menu offerings since the birth of Stalin to make him something vegetarian. Not so different after all, Scott has joked, from his L.A. childhood spent among three foreigners claiming to be his parents and younger brother. (Though Scott neglects to mention that he was then the tremendously--cartoonishly--obese blond Jew in a family of more traditional models: short, slim, curly-haired, olive-skinned.)

After four months in Hungary, Scott blundered into his predictable but somehow always surprising moment of sentimental weakness. Late one night, bothered that his mother might suffer even more regret than he would wish for her, he sent to California a postcard with a picture of Castle Hill in Buda and the text Am here for a while teaching. Hope you are all okay. S. He regretted it as soon as the card schussed into the little red mailbox, but he consoled himself that he had given no address, and surely even they would be able to read between the lines. His carefully constructed world was still safe.

Except that two months later, to Scott's right sits today's fifth competitor, his newly arrived and disproportionately loathed younger brother, John.

Excerpted from Prague by Arthur Phillips Copyright 2002 by Arthur Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.