A great American city is destroyed under mysterious circumstances, wasted by explosions and fire. A lone survivor wanders, lost, among its ruins. Out of a whirlwind of language appear the images of a boy, a youth, a middle-aged man exploring lives he might have led had he made different choices in early manhood, of an old man in a hospital, paralyzed and dying — and of a young girl, a young woman, an old woman, alone, abandoned, longing, in an every-renewed and ever-frustrated search for love. Christopher Bernard's magnificent debut novel, anticipated by his literary admirers for more than eight years, offers a portrait of a society in turmoil, at war, divided and afraid, a world driven from its moorings, in quest of significance in a chaotic time — a world like our own, inhabited by people finding what purposes they can, in the creation of meaning out of the chaos of experience.

Christopher Bernard is a poet, essayist, and playwright as well as fiction writer, author of The Dilettante of Cruelty: Deserts, Gilded Abattoir: Wreckage from a Journey, and such plays as Fellow Traveler, Our Lady of Cries, and A Sonata for the Dead. He has published work in Another Chicago Magazine, Permafrost, Ekphrasis and as a book reviewer for various periodicals and literary magazines. His plays have been produced and radio broadcast in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a cofounder of the literary and arts ?zine? Caveat Lector and lives in San Francisco.