John Wray was born in Washington, DC in 1971. His first novel, The Right Hand of Sleep (Vintage UK/Knopf) won a Whiting Writers' Award. He was recently chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists 2007.

In the tunnels beneath New York a young man is missing. With each passing minute he heads deeper underground, further from the world of light and reason and closer to the moment of his great surrender. Above ground Ali Lateef of the NYPD is assigned the case. The boy's mother Violet is reluctant to help and Emily, Lowboy's girlfriend and only confidante, appears to have vanished too. Can Lateef find Lowboy before it's too late?