Daniel Mulvaugh encounters a stranger, Amos Radcliff, living in his childhood home. Often comic and antic, at times frightening, Amos can shift from con- man to clairvoyant, from pyjama- clad freeloader to something almost not quite human. He tells Daniel stories- stories that become increasingly intimate and unsettling. Daniel moves between Amos's life- as it is revealed in his stories- and the crisis that is taking place in his own: between a woman Amos once helped to escape from Bangkok and the estranged wife with whom Daniel is still in love; between a nurse's obsessive desire for Amos, which almost kills her, and Daniel's fraught and ambiguous relationship with his wife's sister; between a ship full of misanthropic sailors working the ports of South America, and Daniel's two closest friends- one of whom has committed a terrible crime, the other with whom Daniel's wife may be in love. Amos's storytelling creates a space in which time seems to dissolve. He returns Daniel to a past he has never known, but which has been intimated to him throughout his childhood, in the silence and self- imposed isolation of his mother, in the strange, imaginative games he played with a close childhood friend, and in events from his past that Daniel can only dimly remember.