This modern illuminated book tells the story of a boy with an unusual friend who, in a crumbling future plagued by wolves and worse, falls in with a monastic order whose ambitious mission brings him from life to death and back again, through dreams and across time and possibility. It is a book about time, death, life, love and division from A through to Z.

The letters of the English alphabet are illuminated at the beginning and end of each chapter and the main body of text is written in pictorial font. In this book, the words are illustration and the illustrations, text.