Publisher's Synopsis
Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in South Africa, is a committed environmentalist fighting a huge nuclear reactor project with its danger of leaking radiation. He believes he understands the trajectory of his life, with the usual markers of vocation and marriage. But when he's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and, after surgery, prescribed treatment that will leave him radioactive-and for a period a danger to others-he begins to question, as Auden wrote, "what Authority gives / existence its surprise."As Paul recuperates in the garden of his childhood home, he enters an unthinkable existence and another kind of illumination-a process that will irrevocably change not only his life but the lives of those closest to him.
