Ellen chooses to work in a trendy Toronto art gallery, while Adam takes a solo canoe trip into the Arctic tundra. The two characters alternate chapters and points-of-view: the reader frets with Ellen through an increasingly sweltering city, then journeys inside the young man's head as he goes dangerously deep into wilderness. Their impressions of the world around them and their partnership gradually change, until their worlds -- and their changed worldviews -- suddenly and dangerously collide.