Nine-year-old Louis Drax is a problem child: bright, precocious, deceitful - and dangerously, disturbingly, disaster-prone. When he falls off a cliff into a ravine, the accident seems almost predestined. Louis miraculously survives - but the family has been shattered. Louis\047 father has vanished, his mother is paralysed by shock, and Louis lies in a deep coma from which he may never emerge. In a clinic in Provence, Dr Pascal Dannachet tries to coax Louis back to consciousness. But the boy defies medical logic, startling Dannachet out of his safe preconceptions, and drawing him inexorably into the dark heart of Louis\047 buried world. Only Louis holds the key to the mystery surrounding his fall - and he can\047t communicate. Or can he?