Although separated for many years, for Daniel Benchimol, journalist and great reader, it is about time to sign the divorce papers. The process overwhelms him and he decides to go on a trip, and will not stop on the way until he reaches a hotel in front of the ocean. In that lost place and due to a surprising set of circumstances, when thinking that nothing was left to discover, his life begins to start again. Benchimol dreams of people he does not know; converses with them and night after night reconstructs his life: the owner of the hotel, Hossi Kaley, a man with a dark past, appears obsessively in the dreams of others; Moira Fernandes, a recombined artist, photographs her own dreams while the Brazilian scientist Helio de Castro perfects a machine capable of filming them. With his usual mastery, Jose Eduardo Agualusa gets everyone of these characters in a perfect plot. The mysteries of the night open a door to the violent history of Angola; people who were thought to be dead or disappeared change the course of the present; the political regimen collapses; the society is rescued by love and, although hesitant, the future appears to be better.