Jakob Beer is rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city during World War II and taken to a Greek island by the humanist Athos Roussos They spend the last years of the Occupation in Athos' house, a precarious refuge made lavish with art After the War, Athos accepts an invitation to the University of Toronto's new Geography department, and Jakob learns the terrain of this city, just as he discovers the insistent nature of the layered past His loss surfaces in all its complexity as does the haunting question of his sister's fate