Itinerant writer Don carries a broken satchel bulging with hand-written notes, and an ancient pack of picture cards gifted by an eccentric French mother on his sixteenth birthday. His father is Australian.

Don leaves his Fremantle home for the West Australian Gold Country, then France, reuniting with his Peruvian girlfriend in 1990 South America. There he meets Michael the historian, twice by chance, Don's mother killed in a freakish accident and the young writer rushing home for the funeral.

Two years later Don seeks out Michael in Melbourne. A further meeting is their last, Michael finding Don's mysterious pack of cards left behind. There is a phone call to Michael's office the very next day from Don's girlfriend, Maricielo distraught, Don killed in another accident - seven years after the death of his mother.

Michael is a builder's son, methodical and normally self-assured, but bothered by coincidence. He reluctantly attends the funeral, meets Don's best friend and sister, Maricielo presenting him a handful of Don's earliest notes. Michael is at a loss what to do next, hopes his memories will fade and any questions will dissipate with time. He tucks the cards and notes at the back of his sock drawer believing that is the end of the story.

Twenty-two years after the writer's freakish death, Michael inherits seven battered boxes stuffed with rambling, loose-leaf notes. Some pages are blank or half empty, some unreadable, others loaded with stories seeming disconnected - a dead man's diary of sorts. Michael is uncomfortable with prying but increasingly pulled back to something he thought left behind: the ghost of a dead writer, tales of Antipodean colonial cruelties, an odd dream, and records of a family atrocity rooted in the European Dark Ages.