Nine strangers flee bombings in a balloon. They must decide which of them has to jump into the sea so that the rest can reach a desert island safely and start a new civilization. The globe travelers are the only survivors of a world war that has destroyed the world as we know it. What is at stake, in reality, is not the future of the human species, but a temporary job as a salesman in a department store. "This is how the job search was in 2011," could write Carlos, the narrator of this novel, who from an uncertain future tries to rescue, along with other close and complicit voices, the world in which he lived and to which, "for reasons too well known, we can no longer return. From that enigmatic exile, the narrator traces, through apparently anecdotal memories, the dark undercurrents that transformed the lives of all those people he knew, taking them so far away.