At the Wailing Wall in 1969 the author is approached by an American, a man with a story to tell, who introduces himself as Joseph Shapiro. He is bearded, dressed in long gaberdine and a velvet hat, and Singer rightly guesses that he is a baal tshuve, a penitent. Over the next two days Shapiro recounts his story - both a confession and a personal history of the return to a fundamentalist way of life - which forms the subject of Singer's first novel since Shosha appeared in 1978, at the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.