Michael Young has his future all mapped out. He will complete his brilliant history thesis, win a doctorate, secure a pleasant academic post, marry his beloved girlfriend Jane and raise bright, beautiful children who will turn out to be more than averagely blonde and good at skiing - as rosy and perfect in fact as their father`s future. An historian should know better than to imagine that he can predict the future. Leo Zuckerman is an ageing physicist absolutely obsessed with the darkest period in human history, utterly driven by his fanatical hatred of one man. A lover`s childish revenge and the breaking of a rotten clasp cause the two men to meet in a blizzard of swirling pages. Pages of history. When the physicist and the historian come together nothing - past, present or future - will every be the same again.