New Statesman Jules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once.

He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now he's fallen off the face of the earth, and all the search parties can find is his empty monogrammed briefcase, abandoned in the Judean foothills. In her room at the Tel Aviv Hilton, an American novelist has also left home to undergo a transformation.

But when a stranger recruits her for a project involving Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will take her on a metaphysical journey and change her in ways she could never have imagined.