The humorous, poignant story of a declining New England town and its inhabitants, whose lives are deeply rooted in and influenced by the Knox River and its vacant mills, their class differences, and ghosts of the past.

Barley Scott Blair, a Lisbon-based editor of Russian literature who unexpectedly begins working for British intelligence, is commissioned to investigate the purposes of Dante, a dissident scientist trapped in the decaying Soviet Union that is crumbling under the new open-minded policies.