Caleb is an innocent young man with big dreams who enters the service of the provincial aristocrat Ferdinando Falkland.

The hidden and unspoken truths that he will discover within his employer's mansion will push him to the limits of his endurance—mentally, spiritually, and physically—as well as lead him on a relentless chase across England at the end of the 18th century.

William Godwin, one of the most subversive and fertile minds that England produced in the 18th century, writes a novel that is simultaneously a shocking political manifesto against state violence and the callousness of the powerful, as well as an exciting thriller of escapes and pursuits, perhaps the first in the history of Western literature.