Snowdie has to bring up her twin boys alone after her husband, King Maclain, disappears one day, discarding his hat on the banks of the Big Black. Loch Morrison, convalescing with malaria, watches from his bedroom window as wayward Virgie Rainey meets a sailor in the vacant house opposite.

Raju's first stop after his release from prison is the barber's shop. Then he decides to take refuge in an abandoned temple. Raju used to be India's most corrupt tourist guide, but now a peasant mistakes him for a holy man. Gradually he begins to play the part. He succeeds so well that God himself intervenes to put Raju's new holiness to the test.

A story of idealism and ambition, wars and destruction, survival and memories, set against the haunting backdrop of the northern landscape. Blending travelogue, reportage, memoir, and literary essay, this book explores the life of the far North in the 20th Century.

Adam Pollo, an amnesiac ex-student, has broken into an empty seaside villa. He visits the town at rare intervals. Soon lack of human contact affects him like a drug and he experiences other modes of being: through a dog's eye or a rat's states of heightened consciousness which build up into a terrifying world of glaring hallucinatory experience.