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A multi-layered work, in which the narrator, Scribe, during his regular visits to his son in hospital, meets with a patient referred to solely as 28. Drawn into 28’s stories, Scribe begins to record them in an attempt to make sense of his own fractured life. But 28 is an enigma — to herself, to Scribe, and to the reader—and as the novel progresses, very little is as it first seemed. 28 continually invents and reinvents herself, and as the emotional intensity of their relationship peaks, Scribe realises he has fallen in love with a fiction. The ending is both surprising and eloquent.