'I don't want to lose my past,' he said to his doctor, 'it's all I have. It's all any of us has.' Julius Durward, 64-year-old author of the cult book Pandora's Mirror, is visiting the French town of Uzès hoping to meet up with old friends. His memory failing, haunted by a past tragedy, Julius finds himself being pressured to support two wildly different causes, the Utopianism of an ageing American billionaire and the radical extremism of an underground environmentalist group. As the mistral blows and civil unrest everywhere increases, Julius's world appears on the verge of disintegrating.