"When she awakes and realizes she is all right - that Time is starting again - it seems fitting that she should be lying on a spindly white trolley in a white room. A nearby voice has told her she is on her own now and to be good. Was she not good before? The first hours are the strangest. She knows nothing and listens to ordinary people for clues, though oddly, they never quite say what they mean. (Even cliches sound sinister to the uninformed. ) She begins to recognize the peculiar importance possessed by mouths, and she becomes keen to find out more about harm, luck and time. The world parts gingerly to let her in. Martin Amis sustains an unnervingly high degree of suspense as Mary and the reader yearn to grasp what has happened to Mary's past and ponder what its loss has gained her. Unfolding is a metaphysical thriller where jealously guarded secrets jostle with startling insights."