A grumpy old hypochondriac is led into a world of dream and memory by certain pieces he finds separated out from the puzzle he is putting together. They are the key to the walled town represented in the surface of the puzzle - and to a secret locked within it. The book itself constitutes a puzzle: the 'solution' is a fully interlocking picture of the tragi-comic narrator, as he tries to make head or tail of his aimless life. Amongst the ambiguous denizens of the puzzle world he glimpses a girl he once loved and lost...