From the bestselling, award-winning master of uncanny fiction comes a defining work, twenty years in the making - a deeply moving, decade- and continent-spanning epic of grief, global tumult, and grim conspiracy. Maur's life has been shaped by an unbearable loss. But in the aftermath of what is an apparently ordinary tragedy, deeper, stranger questions arise . . . Their answers may lie within the dark heart and darker history of an old soldier who shares Maur's obsessions - and is violently pursued by the same unknown, unquiet forces. So begins a book unlike any other: at once a sprawling saga of a bloody century, and the intimate story of two lives, their loves, regrets and secrets - and a terrifying journey into infinite mystery.