Part fiction part travelogue the narrator of this compelling masterpiece pursues his solitary eccentric course from England to Italy & beyond succumbing to the vertiginous unreliability of memory itself What could possibly connect Stendhal's unrequited love the artistry of Pisanello a series of murders by a clandestine organisation a missing passport Casanova the suicide of a dinner companion stale apple cake the Great Fire of London a story by Kafka about a doomed huntsman & a closed-down pizzeria in Verona?