It is 1978, thirty-one years since the Red Army liberated Britain from Nazi occupation. The British Socialist State is twenty-nine years old. But to Hutcheons, everything seems new.
His memory is a mess. He’d give anything to remember the name of his mother, whether he’s married, has children. He has no idea why he's being held in a State Security prison, or how far he can trust the enigmatic Chloe Salsinger, the hospital wing captain treating his amnesia. Above all, he has no idea why everyone is fixated on a name he mumbled in his sleep.
To Hutcheons, it's just another hopeless scrap of memory. But there's a file on that name. And it belongs to a disgraced SS physicist who died in 1949. Hutcheons would have been a child back then ... yet he used the name as if addressing a colleague.