This short novel is based on the story of Edith Bone, a writer falsely accused of spying and imprisoned in solitary confinement in Hungary in the early 1950s. She keeps herself sane by inventing numerous techniques, from reciting lists of writers in alphabetical order, to playing games using the languages she knows, to going on imaginary walks. It is written under a modified form of the Oulipian prisoner’s constraint , in which letters with descenders (g, j, p, q, y) may not be used.