An intricately structured story within a story, "The Albanian Virgin" explores romance, a term used here in the broadest sense of relating to events or experiences defined chiefly in terms of the emotions and imagination, as an antidote to the divisiveness and rigidity that characterizes the two worlds central to the plot: the world of Claire, a woman who leaves both a husband and a lover in central Canada to move to Victoria, British Columbia in 1964, and the world of Lottar, a young Canadian woman travelling alone through Europe in the 1920s, who is captured in the crossfire of an intergenerational blood feud in mountainous northern Albania.

Claire's world is a place in which passion and a sense of the extraordinary in life have all but disappeared, from the magical experiences of reading poetry to the concupiscence of love.

Writing a dissertation on the later novels...