Infinite Ground

Carlos is twenty-nine. He is eating with his family at a restaurant called La Cueva in the heat of a South American summer. Halfway through the meal he goes to the bathroom, and that is the last anyone sees of him.

An inspector, retired and never named, takes the case. The obvious lines of enquiry go nowhere in a way that starts to feel deliberate. The company Carlos worked for appears to produce nothing. His colleagues describe symptoms he was showing that nobody can explain. A forensic scientist finds something wrong with the microorganisms that lived in his body. The inspector keeps walking the missing man's route until the route leads out of the city entirely, into the rainforest.

Martin MacInnes's first novel takes the shape of a detective story and steadily dissolves it, until the question is less where Carlos went than what a person is made of and whether the boundary holds. Winner of a Somerset Maugham Award.