The tale of an afterlife. "If the inability to see other than that which you wish to see can be considered a kind of heaven, then presumably the inability to escape self-knowledge must be one version of hell." The ill-fated consequences of happenstance: Born into an English country village community in the 1950s, a young boy is led, through a series of events over which he in effect has little or no control, to take the life of a neighbour's child, and subsequently his own. And this is the tale, if there can be any, of the subsequent accounting. The book itself is set in an ever-mutating afterlife that also provides an interim existence before rebirth - an illusory world where, of necessity, it is in large part conveniently repressed memories that hold sway, and where for Eric (if we can suppose that to be his name), each step forward is also leading (with some level of perversity) to the truths of his own personal past transgressions.