A painter is working in creative isolation, under factory conditions amid a crowd of vapid typists. On discovering a note praising his work and inviting him to meet a mysterious Administrator, he decides to abandon his post and follow this lead to the remote mansion at Eagle's Nest. In this castle-like outpost, he meets blank-faced employees and wanders through networks of strange halls, yet the Administrator remains elusive and the painter's grip on reality grows ever shakier. As unsettling and paranoiac as Kafka's masterpiece The Castle, Kavan's fourth novel remains distinctively her own: a study of obsessive alienation in vertiginously beautiful prose.