Stephen Lewis, a children’s author, loses his three-year-old daughter in a supermarket. She disappears without a trace, and is never found. The tragedy destroys his marriage and leaves him emotionally isolated and drifting through life.
As he struggles with grief, Stephen experiences psychological and sometimes surreal perceptions of time and memory. His friend Charles Darke also undergoes a strange mental regression into childhood, reinforcing the novel’s themes.
Ultimately, the book is a meditation on loss, grief, the fragility of identity, and the nature of time.