In August 1939, a brilliant, privileged twenty-seven-year-old American ethnologist mysteriously commits suicide in Brazil, while studying among the tribes of the Amazonian basin. He leaves behind him seven letters, alleging different motives for his suicide: to some, he said he had contracted a terrible disease; to others, he said that he could not recover from his wife's betrayal with his own brother. (But he wasn't married, and he didn't have a brother.) Half a century later, intrigued by this unexplained mystery and the fragmentary evidence, the narrator sets out to discover the truth. He quickly becomes obsessed by the idea that the dead man must have left behind an eighth letter. Slipping between fact and fiction, reality and illusion, imagination and memory, this remarkable novel charts the narrator's increasingly personal quest to discover the true fate of the young anthropologist. As the reader watches, his search slowly drives him mad, a Marlow haunted by the fate of his own Kurtz...