Many years ago, Iris Greenfeder's mother disappeared. They were living at Hotel Equinox where Iris's father was the manager and where Iris's mother wrote delicate, powerful fantasies. Then she took a train and never returned, dying in a hotel fire in Brooklyn where she was registered as another man's wife. Returning to Hotel Equinox, now a struggling academic, Iris needs to find the truth about her mother; some keys are held in those fantastical writings and others in the memories of those who knew her. Kay Greenfeder, it seems, was a woman without a past. But as Iris begins to untangle the secrets of years before, she realises that the past was very different to what she had believed, and much more dangerous...