The story, set in the present day, is about a small, dingy, rundown city second-hand bookshop, The Sole Antiquarian, inherited by the reclusive proprietor from a Victorian ancestor, who presented it as an attraction with a travelling fair. The books hold a mystical and time-travelling power, each one able to fulfil, as a work of fiction, their unwitting reader’s deepest secret.

A fairground theme provides intimate dream-like metaphorical reflections on relationships, fragility, regret, death, love and sex amid the environment of the modern world.