[1] It is set in northern Japan in winter 1903, and centers on a group of travelers stranded at a remote inn due to a smallpox epidemic.

After being published in hardback by Graywolf Press (St. Paul, Minnesota) in August 1996 (now out of print), it was published as a trade paperback by St. Martin's Thomas Dunne Books in February 2002, and then reissued as a mass market paperback reprint of 25,000 copies by St. Martin's Griffin imprint in December 2005, after Libby's indictment that October, as a result of the CIA leak grand jury investigation.

According to the description of the book by St. Martin's Press: The Apprentice takes place in a remote mountain inn in northernmost Japan, where a raging blizzard has brought together wayfarers who share only fear and suspicion of one another.

In the flickering shadows of the crowded room, the apprentice, charged with running the inn during the owner's absence, finds himself strongly attracted to one of the performers lodged there.

His involvement with the mysterious travelers plunges him headlong into murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow.Following his indictment on October 28, 2005, for obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements to federal investigators in Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's CIA leak grand jury investigation, relating to the Plame affair, after the novel was reissued and promoted by its publisher and Libby in media interviews and the subject of subsequent reviews, it gained renewed attention.

Notably, The Apprentice and Lewis Libby were the focus of the following week's New Yorker "Talk of the Town" column, by Lauren Collins, entitled "Scooter's Sex Shocker".

Like other girls who have been trained this way, she learned to handle many men in a single night and her skin turned a milky white.

[10] In his June 7, 2007 Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Presidential pardon of Scooter Libby, conservative academic Fouad Ajami praised The Apprentice as a "remarkably lyrical novel ... [which] bears witness to an eye for human folly and disappointment.