Is the beautiful Thai woman Jim meets on a freezing sidewalk a heartless home-wrecker or She Who Is Outside The Universe And Goes Upwards? Or both? The harsh realities of the London sex trade are light years distant from the esoteric doctrine of Shakti and the sexual path to Transcendence, but this is the gulf Jim and Nam Huan must cross if they are to know what love has in store for them. On the way they encounter human goodness in the shape of Cyril Wainright, the traffickers' enforcer, and evil in the form of Adrian Whitely, procurer of girls for the dealers attending the London International Arms Fair. When a post-Fair sex party goes disastrously wrong, Jim and Nam Huan are on their own, outside everything at last, in flight for their lives, and only the ancient magic can perhaps save them.

Paul Lyons won a London Times Book of the Year Award for his first novel, 'The Eden Man' and received a New Writers Fellowship from the Australian Literature Board.