Nicholas Dee, a young, anxiety-ridden history professor, lives in an unnamed American city battered by winter storms, plagued by crime, and patrolled by police in choppers and riot gear.

Haunted by memories of his brilliant father and by the fear of loss, Nicholas takes shelter in his research: a history of the practice of insurance.

Scattered throughout the novel are passages from Nicholas Dee's scholarly writing, chronicle of a seventeenth century Dutch opera-house, which was built in a coastal swamp on the advice of a fortune-teller and housed a single performance before being swept out to sea in a storm.

But by the end of the book, a personal narrative has emerged from Dee's impersonal history, the story of a man's friendship with a boy soprano.

Interpenetrating and linking the inner text by Nicholas Dee and the outer one by Matthew Stadler are snatches of music - extracts from the score of The Tempest, Henry Purcell's operatic setting of Shakespeare's play.