A young Irishman sits in a Paris jail.  He has confessed to a murder his lawyer is convinced he did not commit.  There is a witness of the run in the city of Paris, and she, a young street kid, may have the answer.  But his neurotic Paris Lawyer, haunted by his own rural upbringing in an elite and snobbish profession, has more personal problems.  The city of Paris is the principle character in this novella of frustrated idealism, art, love and crimes of the heart.  And over everything hangs the shadow of ‘the war on terror’.

I’m going to be a bit radical now and say that you shouldn’t give a stuff about the plot.  Really, it doesn’t matter.  If you’re going to buy this book, you might as well just discount the summary.  It’s merely a skeleton for the real body of the thing: the flesh and warmth you connect with.

I’ve not come across many writers with such a talent for description as Johnston.  The closest is Kayleigh Jacob’s short stories that have an ethereal, magical quality.  This book is simply gorgeous.  It is vivid, strange and engrossing.  Reading it is like walking through a wet garden in the middle of the night.

Remember that scene in American Beauty where they’re watching the video of the plastic bag being swept around and around in slow, stumbling motions by the wind?  How quietly thoughtful, peaceful and strangely compelling that was?  This is the literary equivalent.

Sometimes it’s not about what the words make when you put all 60 thousand of them together.  It’s about the progression of each, single word.  It’s about emotion and beauty.

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