The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers

Eighteenth-century Calcutta. The second city of the Empire is teeming with scandalous gossip and rumour. Abravanel Ben Obadiah Ben Aharon Kabariti, Sephardic Jew from Syria and trader in novelties such as corsets, aphrodisiacs and zebras, befriends the British officers and the local elite by day and records their escapades by night in a leather-bound journal.

1950s Paris. A battered copy of the journal surfaces in a hole-in-the-wall antique shop in Montmartre.