Deep within our everyday lives are existences that might be possible. Brook is a lawyer. Then one day he enters a misty doorway into a world which the Russian revolutionary Trotsky has transformed into perpetual revolution and he gradually comes to understand that he has merely imagined his former condition, that his name is Johnny and that this is the way things truly are. As Johnny struggles to reassemble and record an authentic history of himself and his world, he must confront events that move suddenly to exterminate him and the millions he dwells among.

Kevin Ireland lives in Devonport, on Auckland's North Shore. He became the second recipient of the Prime Minister's Award for Poetry in 2004 and has published 17 books of poetry and numerous fiction and non-fiction volumes including How to Catch a Fish and Getting Away with it.