After the suicide of his best friend, seventeen-year-old Ellis finds his predictable life upended during a single, chaotic day that forces him to confront the reality of death. Ellis attempts to navigate his grief while maintaining the facade of a normal teenager, but his return to his hometown pulls him into an unpredictable sequence of events. He becomes entangled with two sisters, Ursa and Leo, whose unconventional lives draw him into a high-stakes rescue mission. The narrative follows a strict hour-by-hour structure, documenting the rapid transformation of Ellis's perspective as he is thrust into a series of surreal and intense encounters.

This novel is characterized by its intense, claustrophobic pacing and its willingness to delve into the darker, more disorienting aspects of adolescent grief. The hour-by-hour structure creates a sense of urgency that effectively mirrors the protagonist's own unraveling and subsequent reconstruction of his identity. Readers often note the surreal, dreamlike quality of the prose, which distinguishes the work from more traditional coming-of-age narratives. The book suggests a complex examination of how trauma can force an individual to abandon their previous expectations of life in favor of a more raw, immediate reality.