The narrator of the book is a dancer living in Amsterdam. One day he goes out to buy some cigarettes for his girlfriend--also a dancer--and is kidnapped and held for a period of time before being released. Although Thomson's book is not as plot-dependent as a thriller, for example, it would be unfair to give away too much, simply because the force of each development in the book and the response of the reader are part of the strength and psychological sharpness of the novel and its emotional geography, which is comparable to the narrator's own mental map of the city:

"There was a sense in which the city had been trying to tell me something all along. You'll never solve this case. You might as well forget it. But I had not been listening, of course. Look at the map. It's all there, in a way. The whole story".

Charting the narrator's attempt to live with the ineradicable legacy of what he has experienced, his revelations are compellingly and acutely delineated: Thomson's strange, disturbing tale asks profound questions about the burden of the past, especially of past events that set one apart from others rather than providing a shared, communal retrospection: how do we relate to others when we have experienced events that defy rationality, explanation or resolution? --Burhan Tufail

Synopsis
One spring day in Amsterdam a young man sets out to buy some cigarettes, unaware that he is about to be kidnapped by three strangers who will imprison him in a mysterious white room, and he will be marked forever. From the author of SOFT, DREAMS OF LEAVING and THE FIVE GATES OF HELL.