Set against the backdrop of the globalization crisis, Edmundo Paz Soldán's award-winning literary thriller is a modern chapter in the age-old fight between oppressed and opressor.

The town of Río Fugitivo is on the verge of a social revolution -- not a revolution of strikes and street riots but a war waged electronically, in which computer viruses are the weapons and hackers the revolutionaries.

In this war of information, the lives of a variety of characters become entangled: Kandisky, the mythic leader of a group of hackers fighting the government and transnational companies; Albert, the founder of the Black Chamber, a state security firm charged with deciphering the secret codes used in the information war; and Miguel Sáenz, the Black Chamber's most famous codebreaker, who begins to suspect that his work is not as innocent as he once supposed. All converge to create an edgy, fast-paced story about personal responsibility and complicity in a world defined by the ever-increasing gulfs between the global and the local, government and society, the virtual and the real.