Escaping from it all should be simple. Quit the day job, check in at the airport, take the next flight to wherever. Leave it all behind. But what about when fate and chance and the whole sweep of history combine to make it impossible?

Karl has held a thankless job in the service sector for longer than he can remember. Dreams of elsewhere, and a determination to escape, naturally occupy his suffocating daily routine. Today is different. Today is the day to put plans into action.

But the freedom he has been promised seems just out of reach. There are things that hold him back, not least his obsessive affair with an American girl. She is in London to look after her father, whose curious existential dilemma is getting out of hand. When suddenly she disappears, Karl is convinced that he must find out where she is. Recalling their times together, and attempting to uncover the truth about her, he begins to understand that maybe the relationship was more than it seemed.

Meanwhile, London boils away in panic; something has happened, but no one is quite sure what. The chaos of the city and distortions of memory make any escape routes more perilous than ever. Amid the rising hysteria, events and coincidences conspire to thwart whatever plans Karl has made. Must he really confront what he thought he could escape from, and come to terms with just how dangerous dreams can be?

Nowhere combines themes of honesty and betrayal, intimacy and anonymity in uncovering the events leading up to a disastrous attempt to escape. It is a snapshot of a time of panic and paranoid hyperbole, and as such is a troubling portrait of the state of the modern world.

This is not a novel about mere lifestyles or conspiracies. It is about fiction in an age when reality is a blurred concept.