The setting is a town called Moor, where during the war thousands of prisoners were brutally killed in a nearby stone quarry. Now the war is over, and the victors have reduced Moor to a Dark Age penal colony, whose inhabitants must endlessly relive their guilt. Among those inhabitants are three outcasts who form a peculiar alliance. The boy, Bering, repairs the town's few precious machines. The girl, Lily, scavenges for the goods that link Moor to the larger world. And Ambras, the Dog King, is Moor's highest authority, ruling by virtue of his suffering in the work-camps, protected by a bodyguard of half-wild hounds. Dazzling and disquieting, this German novel is an audacious feat of speculative fiction that recalls both The Tin Drum and Rusell Hoban's Riddley Walker.