A French philosopher dies during a savage summer heat wave Boxes carrying his unpublished miscellany mysteriously appear in Simon Critchley's office Rooting through piles of papers Critchley discovers a brilliant text on the ancient art of memory & a cache of astrological charts predicting the deaths of various philosophers Among them is a chart for Critchley himself laying out in great detail the course of his life & eventual demise Becoming obsessed with the details of his fate Critchley receives the missing final box which contains a maquette of Giulio Camillo's sixteenth-century Venetian memory theatre a space supposed to contain the sum of all knowledge That's when the hallucinations begin -