Deep within our everday lives are existences that might be possible. They seem to wait only for a decisive change of cirumstance or imagination to become reality. Brook is a lawyer. He is secure, modest and comfortable - a man without huge expectations or ambitions. Then one day he enters a misty doorway into a world where the Russian revolutionary Trotsky has transformed the world by perpetual revolution - a totalitarian world stripped of every luxury and advantage. At first Brook belives this wrecked version of his life to be a fake, then gradually he understands that he has merely imagined his former condition, that his name is Johnny and that this is the way that things truly are. The person who helps him piece together the fragments of his identity and to survive a city in ruins is Jayne, whom he seems to remember as a waitress in a coffee bar. As Johnny struggles to reassemble and record an authenic history of himself and his world, he and Jayne must confront events that move suddenly to exterminate them and the millions they dwell among.