Ezra Stern hasnt seen his best friend from childhood and college in the six years since Abel suddenly quit a successful career in New York to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. In late November, Ezra receives a letter from an estate lawyer telling him that Abel has died and that he has inherited the deceaseds property in the lakeside town of Casco. That evening, as the first blizzard of the year approaches, Ezra leaves the city for Abels house. Over the next seven days, Ezra searches to understand his friends reclusive life and mysterious death by poring compulsively over Abels voluminous posthumous papers, typed on an old Remington manual. As Ezra becomes increasingly immersed in Abels writings, the coherence of the story of Abels life builds and disintegrates in successive swells. Ezra discovers in the center of what had been familiar something irremediably alien, and in the heart of that total othernessthe unbearably intimate.