Six stories, each breaking off midway, nest inside one another: an American lawyer's Pacific journal of the 1850s, the letters of a penniless young composer in 1930s Belgium, a 1970s Californian thriller about a nuclear plant, a vanity publisher trapped in a care home, the testimony of a cloned worker in a future Korean corporate state, and a tale of survivors on a ruined Hawaii. Then the book works its way back out.