Driven coast by power plant from the nuclear expropriations, Alex McNab grows up a lonely, insecure failure. At the age of 30, he's had enough and decides to make a clean break, He lands a job at New Dawn, a rehabilitation workshop in an industrial park, and, within a matter of months, his life begins to change as the distinction between the helper and the helped blurs. Jeff, seventeen and blind, knows all about cars, so Alex teaches him to drive. In turn, Alex gets his fuzzy thinking firmly adjusted by a Jamaican plagued by encroaching Alzheimer's disease.Although Alex soon realizes that the shelter offer by New Dawn is flimsy -- especially when he gets slugged by a politician on network television -- he begins to exert more control over his own life, and his safe, depressing existence becomes a full, exhilarating and at times frightening adventure.