Hearkening back to the tales of innocents cast into the big, bad world, it traces the edification of one Sevigne Torrins--a young Hemingway type, a boxer from "the Soo," an aspiring writer, and a teetering alcoholic--through sundry misadventures: from the redneck steel town of Sault Ste. Marie to the Egyptian cities of the dead, from the soul-depleting Toronto literary scene to the bleak, wind-swept isles of Lake Superior.