The beginning of Neil Bissoondath's novel marks the end of a seventy-year-old man's life. Now living with his daughter and her family, Alistair goes shopping for Christmas presents, buying his daughter a pen and writing paper. But the pen, lying dormant in its presentational box, propels him in a different direction, towards the one thing he has left: his past, that familiar territory unfailingly inhabited by a stranger's life - alien, inexplicable, untrustworthy.
Faced with a future the never anticipated, he begins to perform that strange and wonderful dance, moving forward while looking back at the receding journey, marvelling at how unrecognisable he is, growing stranger, doing his heart good.
