Philippe Labro, a successful middle-aged novelist, lies in a small Parisian hospital, suffering from an unknown ailment that is slowly strangling him. Ghostly visitors arrive, their faces friendly with open smiles. His aged father, his first lover, a close friend are among them—all those he has loved and lost. He is overcome with longing. A voice out of nowhere invites him to enter the long dark tunnel now before him.But scenes from his life distract him—a young man in the Colorado desert playing "chicken", a bored journalist in a car chase during the Algerian war—all moments when he had courted death with little to lose. Now, however, his beautiful wife and two young children wait uncertainly in the corridor. In clear, unflinching prose, Labro relates the contest that ensues—one waged deep in his psyche and in the very matter of his body. Labro's struggle to hear the voices calling him yet resist the lure of death is not merely the exertion of will against an implacable foe. It is an effort to resist Death's insidious, seductive hold on his imagination. An unforgettable story of a man who discovered the meaning of life on the very precipice of losing it.