Quentin Coldwater´s life is changed forever by an apparently chance encounter: when he turns up for his entrance interview to Princeton he finds his interviewer dead - but a strange envelope bearing Quentin´s name leads him down a very different path to any he´d ever imagined. The envelope, and the mysterious manuscript it contains, leads to a secret world of obsession and privilege, a world of freedom and power and, for a while, it´s a world that seems to answer all Quentin´s desires. But the idyll cannot last - and when it´s finally shattered, Quentin is drawn into something darker and far more dangerous than anything he could ever have expected ...

prisoner of war, optometrist, time-traveller - these are the life role of billy pilgrim, hero of this miraculously moving, bitter and funny story of innocence faced with apocalypse.