This is a searing, intimate story about mothers and daughters, togetherness and alienation, and the light at the end of the tunnel. People of different ages, genders, and social circles go to the pool. On the pool paths they find a sense of community, solace and meaning. However, when a crack appears at the bottom, everything changes. Without a daily meditation routine, Alice gradually loses touch with reality. Like water draining from a pool, her memory flows away into nowhere, and her daughter Alice feels her mother, inevitably slipping away from her, in fact only becoming closer, as the long-standing crack between them disappears. Written in a bewitching, elegiac manner, the novel encourages acceptance of the natural course of things and asserts that everything that happens in the world is reasonable, there is a poignant and transformative beauty in everything.