A challenging book that explores, at least on the face of it, the death in the Tangiwai disaster, Christmas Eve 1953, of 14-year-old Robert Hale, a school friend of the author's. Working indirectly, speaking sometimes in his own voice sometimes in that of the dead boy, Alan Loney patiently and painfully makes a journey into the past to uncover the ""truth"" of the events of that night but also the truth about himself and his own childhood.