He remembers only fragments of the last five months. The pages remember everything.

On 25 January 2020, Vishnu wakes in a locked room of a psychiatric hospital. Beside him lies a novel in his own handwriting that he doesn't remember writing.

Five months earlier, he found three newspaper cuttings inside his father's old diary. All were about Nessa, a woman found dead below a waterfall in 1994. The police called it suicide.

Vishnu knew better. At seven, hidden inside his home in Cochin while two men shot his parents, he had heard one of the killers say her name.

Her story was the only road back to them. So he began to write it, and for weeks the page stayed empty.

Then a stranger stopped him outside his office, demanding a manuscript he hadn't begun. She named its characters. As Vishnu searched for answers, his oldest friend Rahul helped him piece together a truth buried since 1994. Always just enough to keep him writing.

One night, Vishnu sketched a murder on hotel notepaper. Two days later, the man in the sketch was dead.

He thought he was writing the story.

He may only have been playing a part in someone else's script.

Three revelations before the last page. Each one rewrites the one before it.

For readers of The Silent Patient and Before I Go to Sleep and for anyone who couldn't put down Verity or The Plot.