Fifteen-year-old István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a clandestine relationship with his neighbour, a woman close to his mother's age. His life soon spirals out of control.
In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.
