It is the spring of 1989 and Erika, a disenfranchised fifteen-year-old American girl, is traveling cross-country to elope with her thirty-two-year-old Iranian lover. The only daughter of two immigrant academics, socially inept but bright and precocious, Erika is lured away from home by Majij Aziz, a troubled and deeply flawed physician whose understanding of love is scarred by a lifetime of abuse and a masochistic adherence to a fundamentalist religion. In the ten months that they travel from Oregon across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and into the Midwest, Erika expects Majij to be a paragon of compassion and worldly wisdom, while he believes she is a blank slate. The conflict that arises from these assumptions, winding a path between politics and myth, humor and cultural miscalculation, ultimately becomes the catalyst for violence and tragedy. Each leg of the journey is marked by an escalating distrust. Erika's expectations descend with each new sexual awakening, while Majij grows increasingly paranoid. A literary story of discovery, TOPEKA, ma 'shuge resonates long after the last page is turned. Atmospheric and haunting, disturbing and prescient, at times hilarious, it is a riveting coming-of-age tale--a jolting, steamy journey to healing and redemption.