"It was raining again," the narrator of this haunting novel begins. He has survived some unmentionable, perhaps worldwide cataclysm - a biblical flood? nuclear war? - that has stripped him of his memory and most everything else. A woman's room, a notebook, a mirror, her comb - these artifacts in a void are all that remain: his first clues to the past, his own and the world's. His errant musings, reminiscent of the guilt-driven wanderings of Orestes, gradually piece together a history he must both remember and create in order to regain his identity, and, like Noah, repopulate a world in which he may be the only survivor.