A house is burning. Its tenants include a failed priest, a naturalist, a neurosurgeon and an invalid dreaming of his boyhood. In this novel the passions and obsessions of these unquiet lives reach beyond the dying house that holds them. Ranging from an African refugee camp to the cremation-grounds of India, their memories mutate and criss-cross in a novel of lingering beauty and mystery. The first novel from Colin Thubron in almost 15 years.