The novel takes place from May 2013 to April 2014. The narrator is Stelios Mescoulas, a middle-aged former school teacher and now a night guard and driver of a semi-truck - carrying boxes in a cellar. He is trying to write a novel centered around Makronisos, in order to overcome his personal downfall.

While going to the island for on-site research, Mescoulas meets the young Nilufer Atalar, a well-off Turkish journalist in Athens, who is also trying to write about the same island because her great-grandfather was a prisoner there in 1912-13.

Mescoulas helps her and Nilufer actually writes a novella, but his own book remains unfinished: a few written chapters and a lot of raw material. In the background of Mescoulas' writing effort, his financial difficulties and the current events of the time are depicted.

If eventually a part of contemporary literary production is considered in the future as "literature of the crisis", then this novel will claim its inclusion in it.