Sarah Wode-Douglas is an aristocratic English-woman who has made her living in the cloistered world of literary London as the editor of the poetry magazine First Proof, until she impulsively follows a family friend, poet John Slater, across the world to Kuala Lumpur.
Temporarily abandoned by the chaotic Slater she encounters yet another poet, Christopher Chubb; an enigmatic wreck of a man whose terrible secrets Sarah is compelled to discover and pursue.
As Chubb's labyrinthine story of forgery, deceit and horror starts to emerge, the towering seven-foot figure of Bob McCorkle, both a figment, and an all-too-evident fact, starts to haunt the landscape of the novel, and the imagination of the reader.