​President Hugo Ch vez's cancer looms large over Venezuela in 2012, casting a shadow of uncertainty and creating an atmosphere of secrets, lies, and upheaval across the country. This literary thriller follows the connected lives of several Caracas neighbors consumed by the turmoil surrounding the Venezuelan president's impending death.

Retired oncologist Miguel Sanabria, seeing the increasingly combustible world around him, feels on constant edge. He finds himself at odds with his wife, an extreme anti-Chavista, and his radical Chavista brother. These feelings grow when his nephew asks him to undertake the perilous task of hiding cell-phone footage of Ch vez in Cuba. Fredy Lecuna, an unemployed journalist, takes a job writing a book about Ch vez's condition, which requires him to leave for Cuba while his landlord attempts to kick his wife and son out of their apartment. Nine-year-old Mar a, long confined to an apartment with a neurotic mother intensely fearful of the city's violence, finds her only contact with the outside world through a boy she messages online.