In a digital laboratory on the shores of Puget Sound, a band of virtual reality researchers races to complete the Cavern, a blank white room that can become a jungle, a painting, or a vast, Byzantine cathedral. In a war-torn city on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, an American is held hostage, chained to a radiator in an empty white room ...Adie Klarpol, a skilled but disillusioned artist, comes back to life, revived by the thrill of working with the Cavern's cutting-edge technology. Against the collapse of Cold War empires and the fall of the Berlin Wall, she retreats dangerously into the cyber-realities she has been hired to create. Adie is thrown deeper into building a place of beauty and unknown power, where she might fend off the incursions of the real world gone wrong.On the other side of the globe, Taimur Martin, an English teacher retreating from a failed love affair, is picked up off the streets in Beirut by Islamic fundamentalists and held in solitary captivity. He must keep himself whole by the force of his memory alone. Each infinite, empty day moves him closer to insanity, and only the surprising arrival of sanctuary sustains him for the shattering conclusion.What can possibly join two such remote places? Only the shared imagination, a room that these people unwittingly build in common, where they are all about to meet, where the dual frames of this wildly inventive novel coalesce into one. Read Less