The main character in this novel is a female child psychologist who is living with a disturbing feeling of the world slipping away from her. One day one of her clients, a nine year old girl, goes missing in the mountains, after an outing with her class. While the search for the girl goes on, the psychologist tries to understand what kind of experiences this girl – and all her other clients – carry with them. There seems to be something they know which they cannot, or will not, communicate to adults, and which in many ways is related to her own sense of reality. Her urge to understand this is even more intense because her own, grown up daughter is addicted to drugs and has retreated into a world where the mother has no access to her.

With Lindstøm’s exquisite, musical language, this novel becomes an examination of a certain kind of numbness which marks our modern sense of existence. At the same time, it tells us something about what communication is: Communication between parents and children, between adults who try to help, and between each individual’s inner and outer world.