The narrator of this novel is a fatherless man who was left by his mother when he was a boy, in the care of his grandparents. After his mother’s death, he is asked to clean out her small apartment. This leads him to the skinny woman in the garden by the tennis courts. She serves ice-tea in tall glasses, and she gives him fragments of a story about his mother, who she once took care of and let perform as a lady of pleasure for well-to-do gentlemen.

For a long time he has led a discreet life as the guardian of some mysterious business in a downtown office building. Without really wanting to, he has also become tangled up in an affair with an art student with flowing hair and golden sandals. For her part as much as for his, this all turns out to be fateful.

In sophisticated and seemingly carefree prose, Terje Holtet Larsen opens the door ajar to a black abyss of silence, pretence and loneliness.